[Taxacom] Botanical Plagiarism

[David Campbell]

Part of the challenge is the maze of copyright laws across countries,
generally featuring the local version of clauses invented by lawyers
without concern for comprehensibility or good sense.

For example, one commonly sees books opening with something like "No
part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or means
without the written permission of the author, except in cases of brief
quotations."  Despite this admonition, I go ahead and use the book as
reading material.

The problem is not a new one for taxonomy- through much of the 1800's
the U.S. did not recognize European copyrights, leading to publication
of pirated versions of a wide range of publications.  Some of these
involve varying degrees of revision and/or misspellings, leaving it
quite challenging to track down what is the original and whether any
nomenclaturally relevant events take place in different editions, in
addition to defrauding the original publisher.

-- 
Dr. David Campbell
Assistant Professor, Geology
Department of Natural Sciences
Gardner-Webb University
Boiling Springs NC 28017