[R] Copyright of messages (was Wikibooks)

[Prof Brian Ripley]

What you agree to _is_ covered in the R posting guide and its references, 
as well as what is expected of posters in respecting the rights of others.

Perhaps time yet again to remind people:

> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html


On Fri, 30 Mar 2007, Peter Dalgaard wrote:

> Deepayan Sarkar wrote:
>> On 3/30/07, Sarah Goslee <sarah.goslee at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On 3/30/07, Alberto Monteiro <albmont at centroin.com.br> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Deepayan Sarkar wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I was just looking at this page, and it makes me curious: what gives
>>>>> anyone the right to take someone else's mailing list post and include
>>>>> that in a Wiki?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> Thinks there were posted to public mailing lists are freely
>>>> copied and distributed. It's a scary thought; I may have posted
>>>> things in 10 or 12 years ago that might cause me problems today,
>>>> but I was pretty aware that I was posting to the whole world.
>>>>
>>
>> There's a difference between public archiving and copying.
>>
>>
>>> It's not that simple. Dealing with international contributors it's even worse.
>>> Under US law (the only one I'm familiar with), the author of a mailing list
>>> post or any other written work _automatically holds copyright_ to that
>>> post (although not to the ideas contained therein, but to that particular
>>> description of the ideas). (Of course, if the ideas are original to the author,
>>> it's good form to acknowledge that regardless of whether the exact words
>>> are used).
>>>
>>
>> I believe this is true for all countries that are signatory to the
>> Berne convention (which is pretty much all countries [1]). The US in
>> fact was one of the later ones to get into it, before which you had to
>> explicitly copyright things if you wanted copyright.
>>
>> -Deepayan
>>
>> [1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Berne_Convention.png
>>
> Yes. It's pretty obvious that by posting you agree to publication, and
> presumably also to archiving.  Think "Letters to the Editor". However,
> you do not agree to just any republication (in particular not to
> commercial usage -- say someone wants to publish the collected works of
> a particularly prolific correspondent, without  paying and obtaining
> consent).
>
> Interestingly, BYTE magazine back in the late 80's actually ran a Best
> of BIX column with postings from their bulletin board. I've always
> wondered how (and whether) they handled the copyright issues.
>
> There is a middle ground of "fair use" and the right to citation,
> though. I certainly don't expect to be cited by everyone using code
> snippets from one of my posts.
>
>    -pd
>
> ______________________________________________
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> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595