[Corpora-List] Legal aspects of corpora compiling

[Mark Davies]

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