"Where is there dignity unless there is honesty?"  Cicero "Even when you're the only person who know that you're doing the right thing, that's true integrity."Juds  The use, misuse and protection of copyrighted and intellectual property materials is a confusing issue, even for those who have property to protect. The graphic at the top of this page is an example that I will explain a little later. **  At the end of this page, I will provide you with links to the U.S. Copyright Office, articles on the legal aspects of copyright and fair use from Stanford and Cornell Universities, and to a Mac users community that has an excellent explanation of hotlinking and bandwidth theft. Violation of copyright and intellectual property rights issues can lead MSN to delete our group. Permanently. Sometimes, without notice.  It has happened to other groups, and we've worked too hard to maintain this site to allow it to happen here. As far as copyright and intellectual property rights, unless you created the material, image, article or other drawn, painted, sculpted, computer-generated or written material, you just can't use it for your own purposes, no matter how benign they may be.  You cannot use the original material in its original state, nor may you take the original material and adapt or change it in any way for your own purposes.  You don't have to personally profit from the use of such materials to be in violation of the rights of the person, company or institution who created the thing you want to use.  I hesitate to give this very short definition, but I will, if you promise to continue on and read this whole page.  Well?  You do?  Promise?  All right, then.  Here it is. Yes, you can use something if... You made it.  You made the whole thing.  You drew every line, colored every color.  You thought up every single word on your own.  It is entirely your creation.  You did not include, in your work, the work of someone else, unless you have asked for and received permission from the original creator, are using it according to the permission, and you can provide documentation of said permission. You know that the work is in the public domain and can provide documentation that the work is in the public domain. No, you cannot use everything else. No exceptions.

For our puposes here, there is a way for you to share information regarding SOM that you find on the Internet. When you find something that you want to place on this site, to share with our members, you may link to that web page, once you have established that it is permissible to do so. Nearly every web site has something on their home page that tells you what their policies are regarding re-use of their materials. Very often it will be called "Terms of Use" or "Service" or something similar. If their document states that anyone can link to their site, then go right ahead and do so. If their policy isn't very clear, or you can't find their policy on their site, then contact their webmaster by using their "Contact Us" or "E-mail" option for permission. Even when I find a generous linking policy, I will still contact them for permission to have a permanent link on our site. What you cannot do is to copy and paste entire written materials or parts of articles, abstracts or other written materials (hotlinking).  Nor can you save an image to your hard-drive and then use it on our site. On the rare occasion that someone gives you permission to do such a thing, you must provide our managers with written proof of that permission, prior to your use of it on our site. Summaries are another potential problem. Unless you are willing to do a little extra research on your own, and then use that to help you sumarize someone else's written materials, please be very careful. Or, unless you are an editor and have all that experience to help you. ...When you are posting summaries, please be really careful about copyright and intellectual property issues. And, I'm sure that all of you know to not copy and paste here. That is hotlinking and bandwidth theft. Doing either of those things will cause MSN to eliminate our group. Short quotes, a couple of sentences, are probably fine, but not always. Anything longer is in violation of copyright laws, which apply to the Internet, just as they do for any other use. The only way that you can use what someone else has written, drawn, painted, photographed, computer generated or created in any form, is to get written permission from the creator of the material. Giving credit isn't enough.

Even the links that we have on here, are here only because I've written to the web site owners to get permission. The only execptions are those sites where they clearly indicate, in plain language, that you can link to them, and the criteria under which you can do so. I'm always waiting to hear back from a couple of people for permission to copy or link to materials that I feel would be helpful to us. If you ever have any questions about whether or not you can take material from a web site or something in print, or wherever, you have to check the copyright parameters. On web sites, you can often find this information in their Terms of Use, or similarly named sections. Most written material does have, somewhere, copyright information. Most visual art and materials do not have visible copyright information, but it still applies. The absence of a copyright symbol, date and owner [(C) 2005 MeMyself&I, Inc], does not mean that the material is not copyrighted. Now, does any of this mean that everyone obeys copyright or intellectual property laws? No, it doesn't. If you spend any time on the net, you will see that lots of people use and reuse or copy and paste any old thing they want. The Internet is so vast that it is nearly impossible to find and correct misuse of materials, but that doesn't make it right. Do copyright owners ever take steps to protect their material? Yes, they do, and I have read, on a manager's group, of MSN Groups that have been closed because of this problem. On a personal note, last year I had to go after a web site that was reproducing some of my newspaper and magazine print articles. Affordable personal computers, scanners, digital cameras and printers have made protecting creator rights more difficult that they have ever been.

An easy way to consider this is if I were to decide that it was important or interesting to share one of my favorite books with the people in this group. I could tell you that it is Possessing the Secret of Joy, by Alice Walker. I could tell you that one of my favorite passages in this amazing book is:  "But my mother never wept, though like the rest of the women, when called upon to salute the power of the chief and his councelors she could let out a cry that assaulted the very heavens with its praising pain." I could tell you the publisher and how many pages it contains. I could describe the cover with its hand caressing the ancient symbols, engraved in the grey, worn stone. What I could not do is to reproduce a copy of that cover. Nor could I quote a paragraph, page or chapter, much less the entire book.

Things that we read or see excite and move us, and if you love something, admire it or value it's literary or technical merit, it is only natural that you would want to share it with other people. You just have to do it legally. ** Now for the explanation of why the graphic at the top of this page is acceptable to use.  Firstly, the original image came from a source, Dover Publications, that gives the user permission (within their guidelines) to use the image.  The original image was a line drawing made from the poster used when the movie was released.  I added a bunch of eyes and changed the name of the movie to the name of this page.  I colored it up a bit and changed, moved and deleted some of the details of the original image.  But, that wasn't enough to make it possible to use it here.  It still had the likenesses of the two main actors.  Even though I have permission to use the image, I do not have permission, under the applicable laws, to use the likenesses of those actors.  Additionally, if the images had been of two otherwise unknown persons, I still would not have been able to use them without altering them in some significant way without obtaining a model's release from them.  So, I cartooned their faces, and clothed one of them, with other usable images, for which I have permission for use.  I changed the names of the actors, as well. To complicate the issue further, here is the link to the U.S. Copyright Office: http://www.copyright.gov/ Here is the link to Stanford University Libraries' article on copyright and fair use: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter6/6-a.html <o:p></o:p> Here is the link to Cornell University's article on the US Code Title 17 Copyright: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sup_01_17.html <o:p></o:p> <o:p></o:p> Here is the link regarding bandwidth theft and hotlinking: http://groups.msn.com/MacCommunityFeedback/bandwidththeft.msnw

© 2004 JC SOMPeople© (Ha!)