Talk:Ura & omote index

Ura and Omote was an emailed public domain newsletter that ran for approximately three years.

Public domain status for the newsletter material was established by the following statement from the owner of the material.

Liz Maryland

Welcome to the first issue of Ura & Omote, a newsletter specifically created for the online ninjutsu community. This is the HTML version of the newsletter. There are MAC, Windows, and ASCII versions available.

If you enjoy reading this newsletter, feel free to distribute it to any system/online forum/BBS you want (remember to get permission to upload first!). You may also print this newsletter and distribute it to anyone interested, provided you don't charge a fee for this service. If you've received a copy of this newsletter from a friend, please E-mail the editor Ashidome@aol.com to be placed on our direct mailing list. See the end of this newsletter for more information from the editor! Enjoy!!!

The article material was solicited by, and emailed directly to Liz maryland, with the intent that it be freely distributed. That fact is substantiated by the fact that it was immediately posted on several web sites without consequence. I don't see the issue.

Paleorthid 16:25, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

That said, the copyright violation concern appears to be focussed solely on my index page. Addressing this specific concern I emphatically state that my index page is my original work. While it has similarities in content with the referenced external links, it is simply a chronological list. I dispute the implied standard that copyright protection extends to published chronological lists of works in the public domain, or, for that matter to any list of works in any domain. If that is not the point being made, my apologies for being dense. I look forward to understanding the specific concern better.

Paleorthid 19:06, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

There was never any concern about the index as such. My link to that page is probably for the same reason that you set up an index: to have a place for globally refering to all the concerned articles. I don't think that it would help anyone to have the arguments repeated on each separate list. My apologies if I left the impression that I was attacking the simple list itself. I do have comments about how this article is titled but that is quite a minor issue by comparison.

As I said before I accept that Liz Maryland put those parts of the newsletter that she wrote herself into the public domain. There is no evidence that any of the other authors agreed with that. In the absence of an explicit statement by them we cannot safely presume that that was their intent. The simple fact that there were no consequences to the web postings proves nothing. It appears that some of the authors understand only Japanese, and that their writings were translated; how would they even know when their copyrights were infringed in English.

The entire subject of copyrights is extremely difficult, and I believe that there are many areas (including the present one) where we can probably publish with impunity. In the absence of a community consensus, I think that a more cautious and conservative approach to copyright is required. If ultimately the community consensus is that we should go ahead and publish certain kinds of clearly defined material for which the right to publish has not been clearly established I can go along with that. Eclecticology 21:16, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)