[Air-L] The Spiders will find you (was wayback machine waspublic/private)

[Lois Ann Scheidt]

Two questions ...
>
> On literary blogs, blogs that contain creative
> writing, blogs that clearly create a copyright
> symbol or request on the blog page that
> copyright should be respected, does a
> researcher have the right to "research"
> the contents of that blog (which to me
> implies copying the content, trasposing
> it as "data" for the sake of qualitative or
> quantitative research purposes?

Since all published work is covered under the same US legal statutes, I 
would say that you could still research the contents and publish under 
fair use exemptions.  However I bow to our legal colleagues greater 
knowledge.

What I wanted to comment on is something I feel has been repeated in a 
variety of forms in this discussion...the idea of copyright for 
creative work (i.e. fiction) being somehow more secure then for 
non-fiction works.  I believe that from a creative standpoint it's all 
the same...published work.

> What is wrong or problematic about a
> researcher simply asking the blog owner
> if it is acceptable to them if their blog
> contents become the subject of a research
> project? Beyond the rules and regs of
> an ethics research board, what is wrong
> with simply asking upfront? rather than
> working surreptitiously, lurking or working
> from an alias?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with asking if that's what you want 
to do as a researcher.  I have no human subjects related problem with 
asking...my issue is more philosophical in that I don't want "in the 
wild" research to become a study of outliers, or only those that want 
to be studied.  Also don't forget that "asking" can, though doesn't 
always, change the phenomena...which is why I don't want to do 
experimental research.

I guess my biggest question here is what would be the problem with 
working surreptitiously, lurking, or working from an alias, is the 
issue copyright or the amount of risk...because they really are very 
different issues that shouldn't be confounded.

Lois