us thing, afterall, it is their computer, they should know whats on it. However, if you had ever run a BBS before, which I do, you'd know that its hard, if not impossible to know whats on your computer. Planet-X, my friend John Morse's BBS, which I co-run, has 50 calls a day. Of those 50 calls, about 35 of them upload or download software. Neither one of us is constantly monitoring the system, nor is there a way to make the computer automatically check to see what happens. Thus, about half of the public files on the BBS we don't know about.Lets take a look at an example of BBSs and copyright, and how they oh-so-beautifully coincide. Sega Ltd., maker of the Sega Genesis and Sega Gamegear, recently sued the Maphia BBS for making Sega Genesis ROMs publically available in a download section. This section was a type of "digital rental" as it is commonly known in the BBS community. Commercial software publically available for download, on an on-your-honor system, you had to delete the files after a short period of time (24-48 hours).Unfortunately for the Maphia BBS, they did not have a disclaimer, stating that the files must be deleted after a trial period, and thus, Sega was able to sue them for it, as without the disclaimer, there was no proof that they had used the "digital rental" system, and thus it was not fair use, as it could be used for monetary gain by the downloader (not having to buy the game). Of course, it could be used for that purpose WITH the disclaimer, but the disclaimer does just that, disclaims the BBS operator of the responsibilities of that copy of software (Elkin-Koren). Another such case was the case between Playboy (I think we all know who that is), and the Frena BBS. The public file areas on the Frena BBS frequently contained image files, and more often than not, they were adult image files. Well, I don't know exactly how it happened, but Playboy somehow found out that this BBS had some scanned photos from a Playboy...
