On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 2:29 PM, Rob Hudson <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 5:22 PM, Xander Arena <[email protected]>wrote: > >> It's nice to know that David's tremendous contributions to origami culture >> will live on in these archives. > > Has anyone considered sifting through the list posts and making his posts > available in a single PDF or simple ebook? > > I'm not sure what license exists for original content posted in an email > list, or how that license or agreement has changed since the list's > inception in 1994. Maybe Anne or Joseph can clarify what legally > constitutes fair use of posts like this.
Neither of us are lawyers, so there's only so much "clarifying" we could possibly do. And, all legalities aside, given that the BOS, of which David was such a staunch member, already houses a large collection of his works on their website, why would the origami community want to do anything else other than allow them to curate more content that comes to light? It seems the most respectful option, and what David would surely have wished. If you think it would be more accessible to a wider audience if it were collected into a single chunk (like a PDF or ebook) rather than a collection of web pages, then I'd suggest getting in touch with Nick and see if he'd like any assistance in managing the collection. That said, my informed-layperson's take would be that there's nothing special about the posts having been sent out as mailing list content, and there is no formal license or agreement under which members post, which means that regular copyright rules ought to apply. The posts are creative works fixed in tangible form - i.e. they should be copyrightable - and therefore the copyright holder (the author) has the right to determine how the works are further distributed. US law has the copyright principle of "fair use" which is "...a ... principle based on the belief that the public is entitled to freely use portions of copyrighted materials for purposes of commentary and criticism." (http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/index.html) Navigating the logic of the Fair Use Doctrine is not straightforward. The simplest case - to quote a section of a work for the purposes of commentary or criticism, say, is pretty easy to understand. When you get out to republishing entire works, however, it starts getting pretty murky. Obviously, the "copies" that everyone has in their own inboxes are there "fairly" (otherwise a mailing list would make no sense; clearly the author of a post understands that individuals will get and can retain their own copies of the material thus published) and the list archives are also understood to exist, so they should be "fair" as well. (I suppose you could argue that there is an unwritten agreement that material goes into individual inboxes, and also into the archives, and by posting, members are agreeing to this.) Distribution beyond that, however, would require evaluation to see if the use could be argued to be fair. And of course there's *educational* fair use, which is its own set of rules. I'd say help the BOS expand and do cool things as the home of the Lister Collection, and all the good stuff oughta flow from there. Anne
