Re: Permission on the Web

[Marie Clear <Mclear3000 -at- AOL -dot- COM>]

Regarding copyright protection, Richard Mateosian writes:
>You can always put a link at your site pointing to the material you like.
>Doing this without permission, however, invites responses from mild
>annoyance to outright retalliation.  ...RM

While I know that it's patently against the law to use other people's
work without permission (even if you credit them), I didn't think
there was any limitation to creating pointers to their work.  The
allegory would be including a book title in a bibliography of
recommended reading.

And, though this wasn't the subject, a previous poster
mentioned copyright law's "fair use" clause.  I just wanted to add
my unsolicited two cents and say that the "fair use" clause is
so narrow that broader classroom use of a copied text is in
violation.  It isn't even enough that the text is used in an
educational context, it has to be used in a particular, limited
way.  I've lost the web address, but there's a great discussion
of copyright law out there somewhere, and it's one of the few
Internet sites that includes the actual text of the law.  So, don't
assume you're in compliance with the law simply because
you're using another writer's material for training purposes.

On a number of occasions, I went to my company's partners
to warn them about copyright violations on our in-house
on-line homepages.  I believe that in 5 years or so, companys'
systems will be audited for copyright violations in the same
way they're audited now for software licensing violations.

But then, I've always been a little ethically paranoid.

Marie