I would agree with Radhika. If posted in a public forum, and if you have contacted them to allow them to object, I don't see a problem with copyright at all. As for ethics, obscuring their user names, and perhaps the forum location, affords more protection than they have given themselves when they posted in the first place. -- Mark D. Johns, Ph.D. Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Communication Studies Luther College, Decorah, Iowa USA http://academic.luther.edu/~johnsmar/ ----------------------------------------------- "Get the facts first. You can distort them later." ---Mark Twain On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 6:20 AM, Maria Eronen <m85327@student.uwasa.fi> wrote:
Dear all,
I am Maria, a PhD student from Finland and currently working with my thesis concerning how celebrity gossip leads to moral discussion on the Internet. I think I have some problems with research ethics. My research material consists of publicly available discussions from YouTube, various online newspapers and celebrity-related forums. Because I'm conducting linguistic analysis, it is reasonable to cite comments from those online discussions.
One central topic I am focusing on is autobiographical moralizing (for example, discussion participants compare violence involving celebrities with their own-life experiences of violence, such as telling how their partner once hit them). This kind of material is what I categorize as sensitive and see it better not to refer to pseudonyms or usernames. I make it clear in my work that in some cases I see it better to stress privacy protection over copyright. However, I will mention the forum, where the comments come from, as a source (such as YouTube). I have personally contacted every one whose comments I see as sensitive. I want to use even senstive comments because they are valuable material from the point of view of the research. No one of them whom I contacted has said no. But of course, I'm not even sure whether they have seen the posts I sent to them (actually one replied to me and just wanted to know more about the study).
In order to protect myself, I have not copied the whole comments, but left some parts of them out of the publication. The problem is now that by letting them know such a research they might see their posts in the dissertation and start a law case (because I don't authorize their words). The comments I cite without referring to the users as authors do not seem as pieces of creative art, but they are typical examples of online discussion.
However, I'm a bit concerned because the posters whom I cite without permission, are American. The work itself will be published in Finland.
Do you think this kind of privacy protection is a good reason to leave the usernames out? Am I too concerned or could this lead to serious consequences? Has anyone had similar experiences?
I would be very thankful if you had time to help me,
all the best, Maria Eronen
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