[R] Wikibooks

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 3/30/2007 5:05 PM, 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.

"Fair use" varies quite a bit from country to country.  I've no idea 
about Denmark's laws, but Canada has no "fair use" doctrine in the US 
sense, just a much more limited "fair dealing" doctrine.  Last time I 
looked Wikipedia had a pretty good description of this.

Duncan Murdoch