Interesting People mailing list archives
more on editors query
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2005 14:18:40 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: Bruce R Koball <bkoball () well com> Date: September 26, 2005 1:43:27 PM EDT To: David Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: Re: [IP] more on editors query Dave, At the risk of raising the ire of your "letter of the law" readers and rehashing a well-worn fair use debate, I will suggest that your currentcustom of occasionally including complete copyrighted articles is serving
the greater good. I believe that by maintaining this forum, with its remarkably diverse and thoughtful readership, you are performing an important public service. And as far as I'm aware, you derive no compensation from it. To the extent that an effort to meet the letter of the law will either cost you more time to maintain the list or force you to include less information, I think all your readers will suffer. I'll also point out that by including complete text of important pieces instead of justpointing with URLs this forum, at least in a small way, can inoculate the
public record against inadvertent link rot and intentional historical revision. -brk- Bruce R. Koball Motion West (direct) 510 845-1350 bkoball () well com 2210 Sixth St (office) 510 548-2450 bkoball () koball com Berkeley, CA 94710 (studio) 510 845-3946 "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." --Benjamin Franklin, 1759 On Mon, 26 Sep 2005, David Farber wrote:
Begin forwarded message: From: steven cherry <steven () panix com> Date: September 26, 2005 9:28:48 AM EDT To: David Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: Re: [IP] editors query The short answer is, no, there's no quick abstracting tool. As to the question of fair use and whole articles, versus snippets, my own opinion, and not speaking for my employer, is that it is a fair use. And as a writer, I have to say, I love for my words to be read - any way they get into people's hands is fine. That said, when I forward items in our publication that I think would be of interest to the list, I usually send a snippet. We prefer that articles be read at our site, not just for the pageview traffic, but because the articles look better, they read better, they contain their links to sidebars, and, most importantly, they have any corrections or changes or forward links we may have added since publication. If it were just the immediate IP readership, it would be less of a big deal. But IP is archived widely around the Web. For those reasons, snippets are usually better. As it turns out, most feature stories are written in such a way that while the first couple of paragraphs don't, as you note, give the right sense of an article, the first one-sixth or so usually does. In a Spectrum article, it's usually (not always) everything up to the first paragraph that has a bold lead-in. Posting those first paragraphs (it's usually about 10-12 paragraphs, in a full-length feature story), along with something like [more] or [etc], to let IP readers know that's not the whole article, might be an effective good compromise. Steven -- Steven Cherry, +1 212-419-7566 Senior Associate Editor IEEE Spectrum, 3 Park Ave, New York, NY 10016 <s.cherry () ieee org> <http://www.spectrum.ieee.org> On Mon, 26 Sep 2005, David Farber wrote:Sometimes I send complete articles to IP. I get occasional complaints from IPers about the use of full copyrighted articles and while I believe it is fair use, I would rather not test the position IF I had an easy way of getting a brief abstract of the web page with the url I could send out.Does anyone know of any browser (MAC based) that can do that for me. ?just snipping the beginning does not often give any sense of the article and I just don;'t have the time to compose an abstract.------------------------------------- You are subscribed as bkoball () well com To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ipArchives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting- people/
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