Re: copyright under stress

On Mon, Jun 12, 2000, Robert Cumbow <rcumbow[_at_]grahamdunn.com> wrote:
>
> I'd be interested in seeing concrete examples of situations in which
> copyright causes denial of access.

Mr Cumbow et al.:

I do not know if you would count this or not, but SPI is putting a database of older computer science technical reports on the web at the URL listed below. We request, and have received explicit copyright permission from holders of several large collections, but do not have the resources to pursue copyright permission from individual authors, even though the works are old enough and the copyright authors we do know (and reach) are more than willing to have us add their material.

So... in an abundance of caution, we simply skip over materials copyrighted by individual authors. These are older technical reports (master's theses, Ph.D dissertations, faculty discusssion papers, and the like). Libraries are throwing them out, which is how we get them. The ones we put on the web become accessible world-wide, and we do not charge for use of our database.

The ones we do not put on disappear into paper recyclers, land fills, and presumably some private collections.

We are particularly disappointed that the Berne amendments reversed the presumption as to the author's intention. If the work is old enough (prior to March 1989) and published without a copyright notice, we can generally presume we can use it without permission (we always preserve full attribution, etc.). Just a few months later, and the presumption reverses, we think condemning some works to almost oblivion even though we suspect the author (in most cases) would be glad to have it preserved by us.

In this sense, copyright "limits" access, although it does not in itself forbid it. Indeed, in much of my own work, I use copyright to preserve attribution and prevent multilation, but in the copyright notice grant a right to freely copy and distribute so long as the work, with its attribution, remains intact.

Roland J. Cole, Executive Director
Software Patent Institute
9225 Indian Creek Parkway, #1100
OVERLAND PARK KS 64210-2009
913-451-3355; fax 913-451-3361
cole@spi.org; http://www.spi.org/ Received on Tue Jun 13 2000 - 16:47:08 GMT