>(a) the legal *and* moral requirement to obtain the permission of
>the FAQ author/editor before reprinting or otherwise using the FAQ
>beyond "fair use"; and
There are several ways of obtaining permissions that are now in use
in the publishing and CD-ROM distribution world. These include:
1. Sending a letter or email to the author, and assuming that if
there is no reply, that republication is OK. (this standard is used
by producers of CD-ROMS of publicly distributable software)
2. Requiring explicit, written permission for everything, including a
two line section of a long poem reproduced in a Ph.D. dissertation
(this is the standard enforced by UMI on doctoral dissertations, and
several well-respected publishers).
I have long felt that method 1 was at least somewhat perilous, and at
worst, morally wrong. Very often an author has changed email or
physical addresses, and so the permission letter cannot be guaranteed
to reach them. Or they might be on the road, or travelling. Or they
might just forget and not respond. Requiring them to respond to avoid
publication is like sending a couch to someone's house, and requiring
them to return it in order to avoid being billed.
As I have done more and more work in the publishing industry, I have
also come to understand the complexity of publishing agreements,
which typically go to great lengths to lay out the rights and
obligations of the publisher and author. Although when I negotiated
my first contract, I found these contracts onerous, I have come to
appreciate how important they are in making clear who owns what and
what the parties rights and responsibilities are. Permission method 1
does not really resolve the author's rights or (perhaps as
importantly) liabilities, since there is no signed agreement, and as
a result, this method may not even be legally binding. In a situation
where a small-fry author's work is being used by a multi-national
publisher, the lack of any written agreement is not necessarily a
plus.
Moreover, the lack of such an agreement can readily land an author in
hot water if he or she decides to publish the material themselves. In
such circumstance they might run afoul of one or more of the
following clauses in a typical publishing agreement:
* Warranty clause. In this clause, the author states that the work
has not been published previously in one or more forms. If publisher
X has already grabbed the FAQ, part of which ends up in a book, this
won't be the case.
* Copyright license or transfer clause. This clause states which
forms are being licensed to the publisher (book, serial, electronic,
CD-ROM, database, etc.) and which are being reserved by the author.
Without a written permission form, it isn't clear what rights have
been transferred to publisher X, if any, and which are reserved by
the author.
* Non-competition clause. This proscribes the author from writing on
particular subjects, and for particular markets (mass-market trade
paperback, etc.). This clause could be violated by the action of
publisher X, causing liability to the author without their
permission! Note also that while an author might be granted
electronic rights for a book, their use of those rights might be
restricted by the non-competition clause.
The body of a typical publishing agreement then goes on to carefully
allocate the rights of publication in various forms and markets.
(Usually the allocation is fairly one-sided, but not always :)
It therefore does not seem at all unnatural to me for FAQ authors to
desire to make such distinctions for their own work.
In particular, one should not assume that a document which was OK to
redistribute electronically to a particular market (USENET) may be
freely republished in another electronic forum (KinkNet), or in
print, since the author may wish to reserve such publication, or may
have already licensed some of the rights, or may be bound by other
clauses (warranty, non-competition).
These complexities make permission method 1 unacceptable in my
opinion. All of the book publishers I have worked with so far also
appear to feel the same way, since they have required explicit
written permission for EVERYTHING. [I even once had to take out a two
line quotation from Albert Einstein, since the quote was made after
the 1908 copyright law was passed, and to get permission, I'd have to
figure out who was in charge of the Einstein estate, etc.]
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