[Corpora-List] Google Books, copyrights, and corpora

[Dominic Widdows]

> I agree. In the United States at least, "fair use" is effectively 
> defined
> not by statutory language but by case law. Case law is an evolving 
> thing,
> and is particularly effervescent in the case of clever new online uses 
> of
> other people's intellectual property. Only your friendly neighborhood 
> IP
> lawyer knows for sure what the deal is this month. If you're Google, 
> you
> can probably[1] absorb the risk of winding up on the short end of the
> stick in appellate court. If you're Ma & Pa Kettle's Kentucky Fried 
> Text
> Mining Company, Incorporated, the risk of litigation can send you back 
> to
> your high school job at Burger King.
>
> IANAL. TINLA.
>
> -- Mark
>
> [1] Of course, that's what the tobacco industry thought, too.

Well, nobody ever made any money suing poor people. "Google / Amazon / 
Yahoo are already doing something like this, so if anybody gets sued, 
they won't come after the corpus linguists first, not if they want to 
make any money."

I think I've seen a few variants on this this advice in this vague 
topic area. But like I say, it's pretty vague and I'm not sure about 
the particularities of any one case.

Best wishes,
Dominic