On 3/30/2007 5:05 PM, Peter Dalgaard wrote: > Deepayan Sarkar wrote: >> On 3/30/07, Sarah Goslee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >>> On 3/30/07, Alberto Monteiro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.