Part of this is a cross posting from the chminf-l by Patrick van der Walk, so apologies to those who have seen it. It contains some interesting aspects of copyright. As far as this list is concerned, I concur with the conclusions below, ie the copyright for each posting to this particular list resides with the poster. Actually, I confronted this problem about 1 year ago. I wanted to "distill" the list as it then was onto an ECTOC CD, so that the list could be archived "for posterity". I was advised I would have to contact everyone who had posted for their permission to do this. I gave up instantly any idea of such a project. Which is a shame, because few if any discussion lists have ever been properly preserved for "posterity". Some might say thank goodness, but I still think its a bit of our history, and feel its a shame to loose it (apart from the warts. We could certainly do with loosing those. Some of you will know what I mean by that). Does anyone have any strong opinions on whether lists like these deserve to be preserved, or to be lost?
"ChemConnect runs a 'Chemistry Journals Page Alert'. This is a service to those who want to be informed when we have additions or changes in our chemistry journals page at <http://www.chemconnect.com/library/journals.shtml>.
Recently we increased our service to our subscribers by sending out a supplement with information and news about (on-line) chemistry journals. One of our sources for this information is the CHMINF-L discussion list. However, we are not familiar with the copyright regulations concerning such a public list.
Does the CHMINF-L discussion list have any 'copyright' regulations on the postings? Do we need to ask the individuals for permission to use their postings?"
Miloslav Nic suggested that chminf-l should contain something like GNU (http://www.gnu.org/) General Public License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
I asked the opinion of Barbara Polansky, the copyright expert at ACS and she gave me permission to post her comments to appropriate lists/people.
"Whenever anyone sends a comment to a listserv, it's like they're writing a letter, and the one who writes a letter is the copyright owner (unless the message is written within the scope of one's employment duties, in which case the employer is considered the author).
Everyone "understands" that listserv messages are posted for the public to read, and that others might re-post all or portions of the original message in a comment, and perhaps forward the message for other discussion, such as you have done for me. This does not put the messages in the public domain, just because the posting is available to the public. So, if the messages are used for other purposes, e.g. sent to people who _subscribe_ to a service, then the postings would be used in a commercial sense, and I would recommend that the individual writers' permissions be obtained."
To Mr van Der Valk, Barbara added
"Even if the "subscription" is non-paying, I would still recommend that you get permission from the authors because they are not submitting their message to your service. It would be as if they are writers for a magazine, and find that you have snatched up their piece. This is just my recommendation, and I'm sure you will hear from others who might think that this is fair use. I always recommend... better to be safe than sorry."
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