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Re: copyright and the list



Susan Knoer wrote:
> Better a conservative published guide than to lose the list altogether.

Is this really a legitimate concern?  Are there cases that anyone knows
of involving lists being banished from the Internet by courts opposed to
quoting other people's messages?  We all know that quoting entire (or
most of) articles from published articles can lead to trouble, but I see
that as quite different from the postings that were originally written
for the list itself.

I would image that most people on this list have an appreciation for
copyright.  But it's still not clear to me that quoting other messages
needs to be discouraged.

The four tests of fair use are purpose, nature, amount and effect.  I'm
no lawyer, but my own interpretation (for what that's worth) would be:

- purpose: Education and professional dialog.  Though admittedly, the
Web archives could be argued as too freely open to fall strictly within
the scope of education alone.
- nature: Email, a medium that affords copying original text to maintain
the stream of conversation within a thread (look up any of thousands of
netiquette documents on the Web for warrant on this one).
- amount: Hopefully, if people are following good practice and only
quoting the text to which they're responding, then amount could be
small.  Otherwise, amount could be weighed a bit against fair use.
- effect: I could be wrong, but I don't think many of us are planning to
quit our day jobs based on multi-million dollar sales of our collected
listserv postings.  We are obviously free to reuse our own words in
other published works.  But I see very little market threat to our own
ability to publish based on others quoting us.  If we were really
concerned about people stealing our words, perhaps we wouldn't be
sending them to a list that's archived on the Web for all to see.

=======================================================
Cal Lee
Electronic Records Project Archivist
Kansas State Historical Society
Phone: 785-272-8681, ext. 280         Fax: 785-272-8682
http://da.state.ks.us/itab/erc/
http://www.kshs.org/archives/recmgt.htm
                  "Obsolete power corrupts obsoletely."
                                           - Ted Nelson

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