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Aucbvax.5802 fa.digest-p utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!digest-people Fri Jan 15 01:31:18 1982 Re: Policy Statement Requested >From CSD.MCGRATH@SU-SCORE Fri Jan 15 01:11:34 1982

SF LOVERS, and many other digests, have often reprinted material of special interest to the digest population from the news wire services (currently available in electronic form from SAIL). It has been unclear in the past exactly what limits are placed on SAIL's use of this material (I was even once told that our contract with them was lost!), but it was intended for "research purposes." I have always considered the digests a "research" (ie not primarily a service) project, and thus have felt that use of such material was justified by the spirit of our agreement, if not the letter.

The status of other copyrighted material is unclear, although in practice we have usually allowed material of news interest to be distributed. Many papers are actually not copyrighted, and others have had a long standing policy of allowing fair use of their material. Thus I would not be upset at, say, the printing of a story from the Boston Globe (a particular example from SF LOVERS). But other publications do take care to copyright things and do not consider general reprinting of material to be fair use. Journals fall into this category, as does fiction. SF LOVERS has distributed technical papers and works of fiction, but only with the consent of the authors involved.

By the way, material that appears in digests, bulletin boards, etc... is not copyrighted by the act of appearing. Anyone attempting to so copyright that material has typically gotten the contributors to sign over all rights for a modest fee (an example of this is the Hacker Papers that appeared in Psychology Today). However, with many contributors (as with the JARGON file) this system can break down. And it is by no means clear whether the redistributor of the material (either moderators of system owners) have any rights to the material.

Jim

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