Stealing Technical Writing (Was: Using...)

[Tim Altom <taltom -at- IQUEST -dot- NET>]

At 09:55 AM 9/9/97 -0400, you wrote:
>This brings up another question...  As more and more companies make and
>use third-party "widgets" for use in other people's software, what are the
>implications for documentation?  We've integrated third-party
>spellcheckers and graphing modules into our products recently -- and
>sometimes those products come with their own Help files.  Is it legit to
>point to that file from my own manual or online help?
>

The original posting concerned the legality of lifting third-party language
verbatim from the company's literature. That is a classic case of copyright
violation. Once text is written, it belongs to the writer or to the writer's
company. You'll need permission to reproduce it. When I worked as a captive
employee (rueful smile) I found that my employer was just packing
Allen-Bradley literature with their own VAR implementations and using A-B
material in their manuals. I don't think A-B minded, but we made sure from
then on to have a letter on file from A-B giving us permission.

Other cases aren't aren't that clear. If you use a third-party code set,
module, or whole app, you'd probably better have a contract in place
specifying what you can use and what you can't. That blows away any ambiguity.

The question posed here is far murkier: the implications of calls, both
hyperlink and software calls, to other people's DLLs, help files, or other
proprietary materials. Can you, for example, willy-nilly send a help call
from your application to the Windows help files? How about to applications'
help files? And, even more, can you modify an existing PDF-based help file
from Adobe, say, to serve your own purposes if you don't change the wording,
graphics, or layout, but only the hyperlinks?

Even contracts may not be able to specify these matters. But I can't see
much of a legal position for keeping you from providing a link to open up
somebody else's hyperdocument. After all, the user can open and view them
anytime he wants anyway. All you're doing is providing a convenient shortcut.

But how about links to specific topics *inside* proprietary help files? I
may not be able to steal your exact wording and put it in my own help file,
but what's the legality of _linking_ to that topic, which is, in essence,
using the wording for my own commercial purposes? Can the help file owner
forbid this? On one hand, it's possible that a hyperlink is analogous to
just telling the reader "Go read thus-and-so and come back," which is
perfectly legitimate in print. On the other, you're feeding off of the
investment someone else has made, which is the basis of most copyright
suits. Is the help file owner giving tacit consent to raiding his creation?

 If the Web is any indicator, the answer is "maybe". Just because you access
a website, you can't assume you can copy anything from it. But similarly,
the law (as little as there is) assumes that if you're putting information
on a website, you're releasing it to the universe. Does a file with a
commercial product come under the same assumption, that we're entitled to
access anything and everything in it, any way we choose, short of copying it?




Tim Altom
Vice President, Simply Written, Inc.
317.899.5882 (voice) 317.899.5987 (fax)
FrameMaker support  ForeHelp support
FrameMaker Conversions
PDF Consulting and Production

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