Copyright & what I learned from my mother

[Karen G. Schneider]

I've done this message before in slightly different form, but what the heck.  

In many circles, "mother" is a synonym for "guru," so we're all on the same
track here.  And what my mother taught me early in life was:

Please and thank you are the magic words

When I was writing my first book--work that I did in lieu of other paying
work, by the way--I asked for permission many times over, and always
received it.  I don't always have that kind of success rate, nor would I be
so foolish to assume this means I could avoid asking altogether.  However,
I have had such fabulous success that I don't begrudge the few times I have
been turned down.

The "magic" seems to be in the asking, primarily, I think, because it is
courteous behavior.  Copyright law is about more than ownership; it's also
about two other things important to the worker-bees of the world (which
includes all of us reading this list, unless you won the lottery): 1)
acknowledging that we're entitled to be paid for our work, and 2)
acknowledging that we inhabit a world where manners still count for something.

This topic comes up in our Internet training classes, and recently someone
in the class kept pressing how easy it is to forward material, as if that
made it acceptable.  I finally pointed out that just because you can stuff
your pockets full of goods from the grocery store, doesn't make it legal.
People who wouldn't consider lifting a tube of lipstick from the five &
dime often can't make the leap to why that digital resource has the same
protection. It's up to us to teach this (and I see no reason why we can't
simultaneously point out how some companies exploit copyright law to their
own advantage).   

As for Roy's role, as half of a moderator of a list hosted on Roy's machine
(friend Sara Weissman being the other half), I know exactly where he's
coming from, and I appreciate his example-setting.  On an unmoderated list
such as Web4Lib, all Roy can do after the fact is comment on a violation;
on a moderated list such as PubLib, Sara and I are forced into an
on-the-spot decision about whether a post is legitimate.  The burden of
accountability should be with the poster, not the list moderator; we should
not have to ask, "do you have permission to post this to the list?"
Requiring the poster to announce permission both educates and warns--and in
most cases, people know what they're doing. I'm past the point where I
believe the issue is mere naivete, because in one weekend I saw copyrighted
material posted verbatim to two non-moderated lists but (simultaneously)
posted as a summary to a moderated list.  A little ignorance I can
understand (though not if the offender has terms such as "electronic,"
"Internet," "Web,"  "digital" or the suffix "-master" in his or her job
title); library school curriculum appears to be weak in this area. I don't
extend the the same tolerance to wholesale, persistent  and informed
flouting of one's colleagues.  

Feel free to have the last word on this topic; I'm now done with it.


______________________________________________
Karen G. Schneider |  kgs at bluehighways.com
Director, US EPA Region 2 Library  |  Contractor, GCI
Councilor-at-Large, American Library Association
The Internet Filter Assessment Project:   
 http://www.bluehighways.com/tifap/
Author, Forthcoming: A Practical Guide to Internet Filters
(Neal Schuman, 1997)
Information is hard work  -------------------------------------------