At 01:11 PM 12/22/2005, Foster, Stan wrote:
>Since Nelson's interests changed and he
>deliberately removed this content to avoid continued email on those
>topics I think we are going to fall foul of some law if we post this
>info in a public place without his permission but I would hope that fair
>use would allow us to share it on an individual basis and url's to
>material that someone else (like the wayback machine) has archived seem
>like fair game.
I will pipe in here on this topic. Fair game? Not quite. The
Wayback Machine created a mechanism for authors to block their work
from being displayed precisely because of United States copyright
law. Using this mechanism is easy, and many authors have taken
advantage of it. Put simply: to republish copyrighted works
(manuscripts, photographs, even song lyrics) without the author's
permission is unlawful.
Late last year I corresponded with Nelson about his excellent
technical articles and offered a few ideas on how they might be
published on the net in such a way that would be satisfactory to
him. While I don't think it appropriate to share our correspondence
with everyone, it is important to note that he took them offline not
because of the bother of continued emails about them, but at the
advice of counsel with regard to his legal liability related to what he wrote.
When all was said and done, is became very clear to me that he is
adamant that the articles not be published in any form on the
web. He has copyrighted all of them and as such they cannot be
reprinted in any form without his permission.
As a creator of intellectual property, specifically photographs, I
can speak to the fair use doctrine of US Copyright Law because I run
up against it all the time with abuse of copyright for images I
create for major corporations. Fair use falls generally to educators
and authors quoting limited passages of a copyrighted work. The
reposting of his articles for download by anyone does not fall into
this exemption.
I don't want to speak for Nelson, but please consider: While Nelson
apparently has not gone to the effort to block his articles from
being displayed on the Wayback Machine, (and therefore they are
indeed available to download there, albeit without some accompanying
photographs) IMHO it clearly flies in the face of his known desires
when individuals make them available for download on their personal
websites. And if that weren't enough, it violates copyright law.
Cheers,
Blake Discher
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