On December 2, 1994, John Lederer <74020.210@compuserve.com> wrote:
> There seems limited value to me in posting a public
> message that invites discussion, when you have also
> claimed a copyright in the posting so that others may
> not freely disseminate it or quote it in response.
>
> Perhaps the copyright claim was inadvertent or you
> will waive it for purposes of non-commercial use?
December 2, 1994
Dear John:
In response to your inquiry about the copyright notice that
appeared at the bottom of our 12/1/94 LAW-LIB posting, headed
"Citation Reform: The Page as a Metaphorical Unit," we did not intend
the copyright notice to prevent discussion of the ideas contained in
the posting, any more than a copyright notice in a book or magazine
would prevent reviewers or other readers from discussing the ideas in
those copyrighted publications. We placed the copyright notice on our
posting because we anticipate that portions of it will also appear in
another, copyrighted publication and we did not want to waive
inadvertently in the electronic environment any copyright protection
that might need to be asserted in another context in the future.
It had not occurred to us that the copyright notice would inhibit
discussion or prevent others from quoting excerpts from the piece in a
way similar to that in which book reviewers and other critics
routinely deal with copyrighted material. A LAW-LIB posting on
November 2 from Greg Koster included a suggestion that the
Berring-Wren debate of a few years back serve as a model for the
conduct of the citation-reform debate. The Berring-Wren debate
revolved around a series of four copyrighted articles in Law Library
Journal, and that debate (as we suspect some on LAW-LIB might
remember) did not suffer from a lack of vigor or of widespread
discussion because of the copyright notices.
So, to allay any concerns you or others might have, feel free
(without seeking our permission) to discuss our LAW-LIB posting or,
with attribution, to quote from it or forward it to colleagues. In
addition, in case anyone has sufficient interest in our LAW-LIB
posting to want to reproduce it in a publication (such as a report or
collection of essays on citation reform), our postal address,
telephone number, and e-mail address appear in that posting, as well
as this one, to make it easy to contact us for permission.
Chris and Jill Wren
702 Emerson Street
Madison, Wisconsin 53715
Voice: (608) 251-1774
E-mail: cgwren@acm.org
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