good points also if you are seeing something because you are a friend or in a circle -that reqd the user to "accept" you - it may be considered pvt (as in FB) On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 9:06 AM, Jeremy hunsinger <jeremy@tmttlt.com> wrote:
mostly i support the view that documents published, like a web page or a comment, are published and as such are not really questions involving the rights of the author so much as the rights of the publisher. this will depend of course, twitter for instance only reserves certain rights and reverts the rest to the authors. as published documents, these comments basically parallel newspaper 'letter to the editor' comments more than the 'private conversation' that some researchers may imagine them as. Note though that if you have to login to read them, then you might be entering a non-published arena. As for international copyright concerns... i'm pretty sure that you'll need to obtain permission if copyright is asserted, but here you should read the terms of use for the publisher, it may be that they have already obtained all the rights (like twitter does) and then reverted some, but still retain the right to distribute, so then you can see if they also allow you to redistribute, which many do, but some do not. as for the original authors, they have the rights of the author too, on top of copyright, which may mean that you cannot change their words or identity in any way for research purposes without their explicit permission to do so. (in the u.s. we do not have the rights of the author in the same way that the e.u. does so this is less of an issue) . so yes, the thousands of researchers who have been assuming that anonymizing is a good thing, may have been doing a very bad thing, but as of yet, i've not heard of anyone suing a researcher for anonymizing or changing words. anyway, i would treat these comments as a. public and published b. owned by who the terms of service says owned it and c. ensure i have permission from the owners if appropriate. _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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