[-empyre-] Re: permission to quote

[Jill Walker <jill.walker@uib.no>]

Geniwate wrote:
> just thought I'd come clean and say that it's me asking for permission to
> quote for a book review I'm doing for <electronic book review>. I decided to
> ask the individuals concerned not so much because I was sure that there were
> legal reasons why I had to do it, but because a list is a community, and I
> think it's appropriate to have this level of politeness to people who are
> semi-acquaintances ... also I think lists should operate with some sort of
> implicit social contract, and I feel that part of this social contract
> should be attribution and honesty etc etc ...

I think of posting to a mailing list or to a web discussion as akin 
to publication - and if it's published, it can be quoted, within fair 
use.

There are many other opinions, though. You could also think of a 
mailing list or the web or a MOO or whatever as a public space, and 
there are rules and ethical guidelines regulating what researchers 
etc. can record in a public space (sorry, I don't actually know the 
rules but I think that you're allowed to record people (on video or 
sound) in a public street or square and use that, but I may be 
wrong). But then again lots of people DON'T think of mailing list 
posts as public spaces. So I reckon it's polite to ask people before 
quoting them.

I've seen some mailing lists have notices about whether or not 
quoting is acceptable on their website and in the welcome message 
that's sent to new subscribers. Perhaps that would be good for 
empyre? Might be useful both for people who perhaps want to quote 
stuff (or sample it or whatever) and for participants, so we know in 
advance how "public" a forum this is?

For instance, LambdaMOO's notice is:
<<NOTICE FOR JOURNALISTS AND RESEARCHERS:
The citizens of LambdaMOO request that you ask for permission from all
direct participants before quoting any material collected here.>>

The Assosication of Internet Researchers (AIR) are working on ethical 
guidelines for using material from discussion spaces, multi-user 
games, chatrooms etc. They outline many of the problems and are quite 
interesting, but they're obviously far from complete and they don't 
really deal with mailing lists, more with chatrooms and so on. 
http://aoir.org/reports/ethics.html I don't know whether journalists 
have or are working on similar guidelines.

Jill
--

Jill Walker
Dept of Humanistic Informatics, University of Bergen, Norway.
Visiting scholar, School of Applied Communications, RMIT, 11/4-15/5 2002.

weblog: http://cmc.uib.no/jill