To hold a copyright means that you, and you alone, have the RIGHT to COPY.  (In the U.S., every piece can have a variety of copyrights, specifying a particular venue in which that copyright holder may copy, but let's not confuse the basic issue.)

That's not "right to copy, so long as I provide credit".  It's "right to copy", period.  If you're not the copyright holder on a piece, you do not have the right to copy it without permission from the copyright holder.

And, for all countries subscribing to the Bern Convention on copyright issues, a piece is automatically copyrighted upon creation.
 

 
WHAT THIS MEANS TO LISTERS.   When you create something tangible, you hold the copyright to it.  Sending it to BB, as per the instructions for sending posts to this list, is an implicit permission for BB to send it to the list-at-large, and any other parts associated with this list, like the archives.  Nowhere else.  It's not permission for the rest of us to forward it out of the list.  Retaining our own archives for our own, personal use has always been allowed, which is why there's copy machines in libraries and the like.

By subscribing to the list, we're implicitly giving our word that we will not make copies of list posts beyond those four uses.

(It's still nice that Dave asks explicit permission, since most of us probably don't remember from day to day that our words could become permanently attached to another site outside where the list is archived.  Nice if he does, but not illegal if he doesn't.)
 

 
NOW.   If you want to bring in someone else's copyrighted work, you have to ASK PERMISSION before sending it to BB (or anywhere else, for that matter).  Then, when you send it along, include a statement of permission identifying who granted it and under what conditions.  Many copyright holders have their own boilerplate permissions; if you get one of those, use that instead of your own words.  Sometimes, a work itself includes the permissions; include that, then, when you forward.

This is the law in the U.S.  The people at UGA could escape (most) liability by saying they didn't know it was happening on a list they were hosting.  Since we're moving to the server at my company, NiEstu, and since I know about the practice, I would be even more liable than BB if, say, Dave Barry decided to crack down cuz one of his articles got sent through here.  By hosting the list, NiEstu (me) is the "publisher";  by moderating the list, BB is the "editor".
 

 
WHAT ABOUT FAIR USE?   Good question.  U.S. copyright law allows for minor verbatim quotes from a copyrighted work, without permission, for the purpose of education, review, commentary, and so forth.  That's how, f'r'instance, it's cool for us to quote pieces of other people's posts when we reply to them:  we're copying just a part, for the purpose of commentary.  That means it's also cool to quote, say, a few pertinent lines or paragraphs from an article, and then give the rest of us attribution and where we can find the larger piece.  So, when you find something on the net that you think the rest of us would be interested in, a much simpler way to share it with us is to tell us about it and give us the URL.
 

 
We learned something important in the past few months, too.  Remember when Ralph tried to send in only a paragraph, but the whole article came attached?  We learned then that AOL schleps the whole thing through, even if the poster thinks it's been deleted.  I'd never before heard of a system doing that, and was surprised AOL of all places did it, but now we know that our AOLers will have to cut up quotes offline and then upload them into their mail.  (Sorry, AOLers!)
 

 
For more information on copyright, a good starting point is Brad Templeton's "10 Big Myths about copyright explained", which can be found at

http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html

Although Brad's a USian and explains copyright from a USian perspective, his discussion includes links to further information for folks from a variety of countries.