HI Ivor,

It's interesting to observe the following change of policy at everything2.com:

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=E2%20Copyright%20Changes

Yes .. things are starting to hot up generally! First off it seems the everthing2.com site brought in the changes in response to the new American Copyright law. I think it's safe to say openguides.org is still under UK copyright law (it's run by UK residents?) which is still the same.

That's always been considered bad form, as in "it's always better to link" (note that E2 does not have the ability to link outside).

This sounds like a safe, smart policy. It has the advantage of encouraging authors to provide their own original content too.

I wonder if we should consider a copyright statement on the site, and a © message on each page (via the template of course). What do others think?

For a content facilitator site like openguides.org I think it's important that when someone submits their review etc. that they agree to:

* licence their review to openguides and that they are the original author * if not, that they have an implied or explicit licence to use the material * finally, that openguides.org (Earle, Kake, Ivor) disclaims all responsibility for copyright infringement

** you should also disclaim responsibility for libel (e.g., a competitor writes a nasty review).

The best way to do this is with a terms and conditions text box on submit of the article/review? You can place it in a small HTML text box if you don't want to bore people with the details, but do include a "I have read the terms and conditions" check box. So that should help protect you for content going into your site but what about people cutting and pasting off yours?

Well openguides owns the copyright ... so there's lots of flexibility here - it's up to openguides! :-) ... you could go for a recursive GPL type thing, or if any use is made it must be acknowledged with a link back etc.

Whatever you choose you could have a copyright link on the footer of your content pages that states your licence. If someone connects to your RDF feed maybe include a terms and conditions box (with a check box) prior to downloading the feed details.

I hope this helps on the legal side ... good luck with it! NIge

p.s. are you guys planning to accept advertising on the site?

Ivor.

----- Original Message ----- From: "Ivor Williams" ivor.williams@tiscali.co.uk To: openguides-london@openguides.org Sent: 02 August 2003 11:43 Subject: [OpenGuides-London] Copyright

...

This is a subject that has come up at a few social meets, and we had Nigel's talk at the last tech meet. I feel we need some kind

of

...

statement on the London site of the copyright status.

Disclaimer: IANAL

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