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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.
<p>Susana Sotillo
<p>Mark Davies wrote:
<blockquote TYPE=CITE> <span class=390462403-24102002><font color="#0000FF"><font size=-1>Sorry
I'm jumping in so late on this.</font></font></span><span class=390462403-24102002></span><span class=390462403-24102002><font color="#0000FF"><font size=-1>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. </font></font></span><span class=390462403-24102002></span><span class=390462403-24102002><font color="#0000FF"><font size=-1>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.</font></font></span> </blockquote>
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