[pct-l] Plagiarism (Was: tips and tricks - problems.)

[tangent at meinfelder.com (Tangent)]

At 05:07 PM 3/3/2004 -0700, SJ wrote:
>I'd say to leave the information available, it all looks really helpful.  If
>someone doesn't want their comments included in someone's archive then they
>should explicitly state their desires on reuse and copyrights when posting
>messages.  If they didn't mention anything in the original post then it's
>too late to cry about it now.  Litigious Americans make me sick.

There are problems with the above statements of which, everyone should be 
aware.

 > "If someone doesn't want their comments included in someone's archive then
 > they should explicitly state their desires on reuse and copyrights when 
posting
 > messages."

Copyright law does not work this way, in fact, it's the opposite. Since 
April 1, 1989, the U.S. has been following the Berne copyright convention. 
This means, in the USA and other nations, most works have implicit 
copyright protection whether you see a notice or not. Therefore, the 
correct action is to assume the work of others is protected under copyright 
law. This doesn't mean the author can't grant certain rights to individuals 
or everyone; they can. You simply cannot assume rights to other people's 
work you do not have. (My preferred way to grant other people rights to my 
work is under a creative commons license.)

There's a good reason for this. Copyright lawsuits are unlike most other 
cases. In copyright law, the burden of proof is on the accused, not the 
accuser. Here, the accused is the holder of the copyright.

 > "If they didn't mention anything in the original post then it's too late 
to cry
 > about it now."

Most lawyers would have us believe if we don't defend copyright, we loose 
rights to our work. However, this is false. Still, expect copyright holders 
to defend their rights if only because no one likes having their work 
borrowed or stolen without permission.

 > "Litigious Americans make me sick."

You may think the posting of the information falls under fair use because 
the was for research. Fair use is an exemption to copyright allowing for 
research and education. David Tibor's work almost qualifies, but the point 
of fair use is to allow people to build on the works of others to express 
their own ideas and opinions. Fair use does not grant the permission to 
indiscriminantly copy and include the work of others and certainly not 
without attribution.

Though I appreciated what David was attempting to do, the bulk of the 
information is still available in the PCT-L archives. Some email lists have 
the text "Postings may not be re-printed in any form without the express 
consent of the author - Please respect their contributions" to prevent this 
kind of confusion and not limit rights.

References:

Copyright Myths by Brad Templeton - 
http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html
United States Joins Bern Copyright Convention - 
http://www.lgu.com/publications/softcopy/7.shtml
The Creative Commons License - http://creativecommons.org/
The Book Arts Email List - 
http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/bookarts/index.shtml

Tangent