I have also had to consult lawyers about the use of Web-based materials
for compiling a specialized corpus. The material I used for my research
(and continue to use) was deleted by the owners of the bulletin board
three years ago. One of these lawyers explained to me that unless I was
planning to sell their "deleted" material, I could use it for academic
purposes. I also called the owners before downloading the material and
sent them copies of two articles I had published using their original
data. Just to make sure, I decided to take a graduate course in
Cyberlaw. It was very helpful. All I can say is that things are not
black and white in this area. Since I don't believe in selling
knowledge-related artifacts (or buying things and software I could get
for free), I will abide by the existing copyright laws in the US.
Susana Sotillo
Mark Davies wrote:
> Sorry I'm jumping in so late on this.A couple of months ago I was
> talking to a lawyer/professor from another university, who specializes
> in copyright law as it applies to electronic materials and more
> specifically, electronic materials on the Web. I explained to him a
> project where I had a large amount of material in a web-based corpus,
> but users could only see the hits in very short context concordance
> lines. His view was that because the material that was made available
> to the end user was so radically different from the original format
> (i.e. complete texts), there was no problem at all. In addition, I
> emailed a second professor at another university, who also specializes
> in copyright law as it applies to the Internet, and she said basically
> the same thing. So that's perhaps a different view of the issue, at
> least from here in the United States. And as these two lawyers
> explained it to me, the copyright law that matters is the law of the
> country from which the corpus materials are distributed, NOT the
> country where the original texts were created OR the country from
> which end users access the materials. That's why I'm only concerned
> with U.S. law, as far as my corpus is concerned.
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