Gophers and Intellectual Property

Fri Apr 30 18:53:05 CDT 1993

        I have been following the debate about the legality of
intellectual property with some interest, especially when dealing with
issues like access to collections resources.  However, outside this
area of collections resources, this issue is important too... here is
a posting to the comp.infosystems.gopher newsgroup that I thought
had some bearing on this matter.  As systemic biologists become more
and more familar and more and more involved with on-line data and
on-line data tools, we will probably be facing issues of "fair use",
if not sooner than later...

---------------------comp.infosystems.gopher post-----------------------
Article: 3964 of comp.infosystems.gopher
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From: letovsky-stan at cs.yale.edu (Stan Letovsky)
Subject: Copyright, Citability and Gopher+ Attributes
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Bcc: sysadmin at locus.nalusda.gov, rrobbins at welchlab.welch.jhu.edu,
 jod at ccat.sas.upenn.edu (James O'Donnell)
Organization: Yale University Computer Science Dept., New Haven, CT 06520-2158
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1993 12:19:15 GMT

Enclosed is a message that was forwarded to a group of gopherized
biologists I work with who have been discussing copyright,
control and citability issues in gopher recently. Appended
are some thoughts on how gopher+ could make a difference here.

Forwarded message:
From: jod at ccat.sas.upenn.edu (James O'Donnell)
Posted-Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1993 17:23:03 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Gopher and Copyright
To: humanist at brownvm.bitnet, pacs-l at uhupvm1.bitnet, vpiej-l at vtvm1.bitnet
Content-Length: 3025

(Posted to three lists:  further posting permitted, esp. to gopher-manager
lists)

        As e-editor of Bryn Mawr Classical Review, I have run across a
potentially troubling problem.  Many gopher menus show assorted
e-journals, and BMCR is a staple on these lists.  I discovered today that
one particular server was supplying our texts in a woefully out of date
and unauthorized version.  They probably came from a one-time experiment I
authorized to take some of our files and make them available on WAIS at a
time when WAIS was the newest thing on the block.  Since that time, we
have worked out a good arrangement with the e-text center at the
University of Virginia Library to maintain the only authorized current
archive of our files:  that way, I only have to make corrections, changes,
etc., in one place.
        But the site I found was using old files.  I asked veronica to
check out the world of gopher tunnels for me, searching the word MAWR, and
got back five screenfuls of hits.  I did not do an exhaustive check, but
the results were dismaying:  many of the sites were clearly using old
files, and had apparently downloaded them from somewhere in a batch some
time ago, stuffed them in a local gopher hole, and forgotten about them.
Users of those gophers will think BMCR an odd publication that ceased some
time ago.
        This is all around distressing and raises questions of control and
management of e-resources.  As I think about it, it seems to me that this
is a place where copyright gives us still a useful way of thinking about
the problem, if not an immediate solution.  By no stretch of the
imagination is it "fair use" to take all the existing files of a
publication (which expresses its claim to copyright with each issue, but
that claim is superfluous under the 1976 act; and we do have an ISSN for
the e-version to identify it further) and make them available for
unsupervised copying by others.  It seems to me not only common courtesy,
but in fact an outright legal requirement, that if you wish to put files
on your machine for others to consult, you make certain that you have the
permission of the copyright holder to do so.  This will ensure that the
copyright holder can express very legitimate concerns:  for the
completeness, accuracy, and currency of the data, and for the uses to
which the material will be put.
        But in the free and easy world of gopher today, my distinct
impression is that files fly around very casually.  Some gophers are
carefully nurtured and managed, others are compost heaps.  Individual
users can and should pay attention to how the gopher at their institution
that they rely on is managed and insist on quality control; and those of
us who create material that finds its way into gopher holes should not be
bashful about insisting -- for the benefit of authors, "publishers", and
readers alike -- that good management and respect for legal rights be a
part of the system.

Jim O'Donnell
Department of Classical Studies
University of Pennsylvania
jod at ccat.sas.upenn.edu

------- End of forwarded message
This letter is primarily concerned with copyright; other letters
in our group have focussed on issues relevant to scientific
use of gopher: how can you cite info in a gopher hole, particularly
when there is no commitment that that info will persist -- it
may move, vanish, or be so edited that the citation is no longer
coherent, or even come to contradict previous conclusions.
Solutions to these problems will require both social and
technological shifts; I want to point out a technological
one. Gopher+ attributes will be useful for storing information
such as the author or curator of a file, the last-modification
date, copyright and duplication policy, even change history.
Where and how these attributes will be stored I have no idea.
However: if the  SAVE function that is used to copy files to
one's local machine copied the attribute info as well (and
perhaps augmented it with a "Copied from" attribute) then by
default, copying would preserve attribute info, which
would ameliorate the problem. Making the attribute info
integral to the file, in the form of some kind of structured
header (like mail) would be one way to do this.

        Although why these net-o-paths want to waste their
own diskspace on redundant and obsolete copies of things instead
of just adding links to their menus is beyond me.

-Stan

------------------------------  END  -----------------------------------

Robert Guralnick
Systems Administrator
Museum of Paleontology
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
robg at fossil.berkeley.edu
(510) 642-9696