RE: [Corpora-List] Legal aspects of compiling corpora

From: Martin Wynne (martin.wynne@ota.ahds.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Jun 17 2003 - 15:50:16 MET DST

  • Next message: peetm: "RE: [Corpora-List] Legal aspects of compiling corpora"

    There is a lot of advice on copyright at the Arts and Humanities Data
    Service website at http://ahds.ac.uk/copyrightfaq.htm.

    My non-professional understanding is that the publication of a document on
    the web does not make it legal to copy it. You may however infer that
    someone who has made a document freely available to be read on the web will
    not be unhappy if you copy it and use it for research, and they are unlikely
    to sue you, but copying is still technically illegal.

    However, as has been pointed out, Google caches webpages, and so indeed does
    your browser, and this could be interpreted as a violation of copyright,
    although I don't believe that this has been tested in law.
    In the real world, corpus builders usually weigh up the

    As Bill Mann pointed out, there are archives like ours, the Oxford Text
    Archive, which have resources which are cleared for copyright for research
    use. This means that you can be confident about downloading and using a
    resource from a trusted archive like this. But this doesn't really help to
    take advantage of the mass of electronic text out there on the web.

    In the case of the BNC, the copyright holders of all the texts have
    explicitly given permission for the use of the texts in research, so
    licensed users of the BNC should have no concerns about copyright.

    __
    Martin Wynne
    Head of the Oxford Text Archive

    Oxford University Computing Services
    13 Banbury Road
    Oxford
    UK - OX2 6NN
    Tel: +44 1865 283299
    Fax: +44 1865 273275
    martin.wynne@ota.ahds.ac.uk
     



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