Suzy and all -- First off, I am a law student with some background in copyright law, but I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. I think I'm right, but that's as much as I'm willing to guarantee. The statement you have on the front page is pretty good, and will probably prevent the Bealls fo the world from ripping you off. I might rewrite it like this, and if it's easy to do, stick it at the top of every packet in the archive: === Snip! == The copyright owners have granted permission for these packets to be used only for personal, non-commercial purposes or for practices within an academic competition team. Any other use, including but not limited to the use of these packets in any academic competition involving more than one academic competition team, is prohibited without the express permission of the copyright owner, which is not necessarily the Stanford College Bowl Club. === Snip! === A larger issue is the general copyright situation for packets in packet-submission tournaments. Who owns the copyright to a question? The question writer? The question writer's team? The tournament sponsor? IS a question a work-for-hire for the team, which licenses the packet to the tournament? Is the whole packet a work-for-hire for the tournament sponsor, in consideration of permission to compete in the tournament? Who knows? Since the amount of copyright litigation in the QB community is going to be EXTREMELY small (I hope), a set of agreed-upon rules will do just as well as figuring out and codifying everyone's copyright situation. The problem is not, as far as I know, people deliberately doing things with packets they know they can't do; it's that people don't know what they can do. A draft set of packet-distribution rules for packets submitted to tournaments might be as follows, from what I understand of the community standards: 1. Submitting a packet to a tournament is granting a perpetual, exclusive license to use, modify, and redistribute the packet, as well as to authorize further distribution by other parties. 2. Once a packet is submitted to a tournament, no part of it may be submitted to another tournament or otherwise distributed without the consent of the tournament sponsor. 3. Packets distributed by a tournament sponsor may be used at team practices, but may not be used at any academic competition involving more than one academic competition team. 4. Packets distributed by a tournament sponsor may not be copied and redistributed outside the receiving organization without the consent of the tournament sponsor. Comments? Joe Gratz On Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 04:26:43AM -0000, Suzy wrote: > This is something I'd also be very interested in knowing, for the sake > of the Stanford Archive. Whilst redoing the Archive, I put up my > (hamhanded, uninformed) statement of what I thought the general > copyright rules were. I just thought we should go on record as > saying, "No, it's not ok to charge high school students exorbitant > amounts of money to play on these questions that have generously been > made available to us for free." > > I don't think packets default to the public domain even if the > organization allows them to be posted to the Archive - the situation > seems to be analogous to content posted in a freely accessible online > publication. The copyright owner certainly retains some rights. > Since I am nowhere near a lawyer or law student, I'm going to stop > that train of thought right now before I get further behind. > > That said, if someone who *is* more familiar with legal matters would > like to help me draft a better statement for the Archive that > concisely explains what rights the organizations who own the packets > retain, and what is and is not considered fair use of the packets, > that would be wonderful. > > suzy
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:46 AM EST EST