Aucbvax.5802
fa.digest-p
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!digest-people
Fri Jan 15 01:31:18 1982
Re:   Policy Statement Requested
>From CSD.MCGRATH@SU-SCORE Fri Jan 15 01:11:34 1982

SF LOVERS, and many other digests, have often reprinted material of
special interest to the digest population from the news wire services
(currently available in electronic form from SAIL).  It has been
unclear in the past exactly what limits are placed on SAIL's use of
this material (I was even once told that our contract with them was
lost!), but it was intended for "research purposes."  I have always
considered the digests a "research" (ie not primarily a service)
project, and thus have felt that use of such material was justified
by the spirit of our agreement, if not the letter.

The status of other copyrighted material is unclear, although in
practice we have usually allowed material of news interest to be
distributed.  Many papers are actually not copyrighted, and others
have had a long standing policy of allowing fair use of their
material.  Thus I would not be upset at, say, the printing of a
story from the Boston Globe (a particular example from SF LOVERS).
But other publications do take care to copyright things and do not
consider general reprinting of material to be fair use.  Journals
fall into this category, as does fiction.  SF LOVERS has distributed
technical papers and works of fiction, but only with the consent
of the authors involved.

By the way, material that appears in digests, bulletin boards, etc...
is not copyrighted by the act of appearing.  Anyone attempting to
so copyright that material has typically gotten the contributors to
sign over all rights for a modest fee (an example of this is the
Hacker Papers that appeared in Psychology Today).  However, with
many contributors (as with the JARGON file) this system can break
down.  And it is by no means clear whether the redistributor of
the material (either moderators of system owners) have any rights to
the material.

Jim

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