On 7/14/98, Madelyn C. Littman <flw_mcl[_at_]email.msn.com> wrote:
>
> On July 11, 1998, Fredrick O'Keefe wrote asking for advice on the use of
> an email story that appeared on a web site that contained a copyright
> notice.
Actually, the question may have come from me rather than Mr. O'Keefe; certainly my question fit this scenario. Let me update and query further.
> My advice is to obtain the permission of the owner of the web page on
> which the copyright notice appeared. Although there is still some
> dispute as to how the copyright laws apply when material appears on the
> Internet, there is no doubt that a copyright owner's permission must be
> obtained when it is diligent enough to put a notice on the material. If
> that owner is not the owner of a copyright for that particular part of
> the web page, the web page has its own copyright problems. I do not
> believe there is an obligation to research the origin of a story when it
> has appeared in copyrighted material.
This advice is really helpful in principle. The story did appear on a web page with a copyright notice. So it would be very helpful if I knew that there was substantial agreement that one need search no further for the origin of the story once one has obtained permission from that web page owner. Is this something that members of this list would dispute? Even if the we page has copyright problems of its own?
Unfortunately, to make things more complicated, I did contact the owners of two web sites that had the story. One did not use a copyright mark, said he got it from someone else, and that someone else proved untracable. The other did use a copyright mark, but denied ownership of the copyright of the story saying the company only implied copyright of its own original materials on the site. He gave me several leads, which I followed until the trail ran cold when one person's email address proved unusable.
So I am left with the original dilemma. It seems likely impossible to trace the "true" copyright owner no matter how diligently I work at it. Moreover, I suspect this would be a very common situation given how these things are passed around through huge numbers of people over email.
> Furthermore, it is unlikely that you can use the material with the
> criteria of fair use if you are using it for a commercial purpose. If
> you are using it for a book that will provide you with royalties, this
> will be a tough sell to any court that reviews the case.
As an aside, I have also found an opinion on this fair use matter of the commercial purpose that in order for this criterion to apply, the material must add materially to the value of the commercial product. In this case, a one paragraph story in a 500 page book will make no discernable difference at all to the book's value, I would think. Would you agree with this interpretation?
Will Shadish
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Mon Mar 26 2007 - 00:35:30 GMT