[Corpora-List] Legal aspects of compiling corpora

[Gabriela.Saldanha at dcu.ie]

I'm surprised to see that Doug Cooper's suggestion about
coming up with a position statement hasn't been taken up.
I think it would be most helpful in that it would provide
support to those building a corpus and negotiating permissions
from copyright holders. It won't make it more or less legal,
but it would be an authoritative opinion.

Gaby Saldanha
SALIS - DCU


>-- Original Message --
>Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2003 01:22:10 +0700
>To: corpora at hd.uib.no
>From: Doug Cooper <doug at th.net>
>Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Legal aspects of compiling corpora
>
>
>At 14:40 13/6/03 +0100, Mark Sanderson wrote:
>>  I think the honest answer is that it is a question with no clear answer.
>
>Not so clear.  The original query was whether a 100-
>character citation of a text would be a copyright violation.
>Is there a copyright law anywhere that does not grant
>"fair use" rights to this sort of minimal citation in all but
>pathological cases (eg. extremely short texts like song
>lyrics, or perhaps many consecutive citatations of a
>single text)?
>
>  In any case, this question comes up periodically, and the
>response is almost invariably something along the lines of
>'well, you'll probably get away with it.'
>
>  I am rather surprised that the corpus-using community has
>not come out with a position statement -- not everybody has
>to sign on to it, of course --  that articulates the point of view
>that:
>
>   a) distributing minimal citations of copyrighted texts, and
>   b) allowing public, indirect access to privately held collections
>       of copyrighted texts for statistical purposes
>are:
>   a) a necessary part of corpus linguistics research, and
>   b) believed by CL practitioners to be inherently protected
>    as fair use, particularly in non-profit research contexts.
>
>and perhaps also gives a few examples of what might _not_
>be considered professional conduct; eg. making full texts
>available or easily reconstructed.
>
>  It seems to me that such a statement would be useful in:
>
>   a) helping to clarify that CL applications promote the
>      'Progress of Science;' ie. are a genuine research use;
>   b) helping individual researchers show that they are
>      acting in good faith. in accordance with others in the
>      profession.
>
>  Obviously, a bunch of us getting together and saying that
>black is white won't make it so.  But to the extent that there
>_is_ a possible gray area in the balance between copyright
>and fair use, I think it is important to start to establish our side's

>position as well.
>
>  Doug Cooper
>

Gaby Saldanha
SALIS - DCU
Te.: 353 1 700 8217