[Air-L] a question about privacy protection and copyright in Internet research

Jeremy hunsinger jeremy at tmttlt.com
Fri May 6 06:06:25 PDT 2011


mostly i support the view that documents published, like a web page or
a comment, are published and as such are not really questions
involving the rights of the author so much as the rights of the
publisher.   this will depend of course, twitter for instance only
reserves certain rights and reverts the rest to the authors.  as
published documents, these comments basically parallel newspaper
'letter to the editor' comments more than the 'private conversation'
that some researchers may imagine them as.  Note though that if you
have to login to read them, then you might be entering a non-published
arena.  As for international copyright concerns...  i'm pretty sure
that you'll need to obtain permission if copyright is asserted, but
here you should read the terms of use for the publisher, it may be
that they have already obtained all the rights (like twitter does) and
then reverted some, but still retain the right to distribute, so then
you can see if they also allow you to redistribute, which many do, but
some do not.   as for the original authors,  they have the rights of
the author too, on top of copyright, which may mean that you cannot
change their words or identity in any way for research purposes
without their explicit permission to do so.  (in the u.s. we do not
have the rights of the author in the same way that the e.u. does so
this is less of an issue)  .  so yes, the thousands of researchers who
have been assuming that anonymizing is a good thing, may have been
doing a very bad thing, but as of yet, i've not heard of anyone suing
a researcher for anonymizing or changing words.  anyway, i would treat
these comments as a. public and published b. owned by who the terms of
service says owned it  and c. ensure i have permission from the owners
if appropriate.



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