[cc-community] US Federal sites claiming copyright restrictions
Chris Watkins
chriswaterguy at appropedia.org
Mon Feb 11 18:14:49 EST 2008
Can anyone lend some insight or legal perspectives into sites such as the
following two, which claim copyright even though they're US federal sites -
an agency in one case, a federally owned corporation in the other.
The EPA.gov site, which is federal and should be public domain (assuming
it's the work of federal employee), states that "Commercial use of the
documents available from this server may be protected under the U.S. and
Foreign Copyright Laws". This is worded very vaguely, but I assume the only
way it could make sense is if a third party held the copyright - in which
case the permission to distribute or copy doesn't make sense. The full
statement is:
"Information presented on this WWW site is considered public information and
may be distributed or copied. The U.S. Government retains a nonexclusive,
royalty-free license to publish or reproduce these documents, or allow
others to do so, for U.S. Government purposes. These documents may be freely
distributed and used for non-commercial, scientific and educational
purposes. Commercial use of the documents available from this server may be
protected under the U.S. and Foreign Copyright Laws. Individual documents on
this server may have different copyright conditions, and that will be noted
in those documents."
(This is for a regional sub-website of the EPA, as I could find no statement
for the site as a whole. But I think the same principle applies.)
Another confusing site is tva.gov - although TVA is a federally owned
corporation, the notice at http://www.tva.gov/disclaim.htm states: 'All
trademarks, logos, service marks, and copyrighted material contained on this
Web site ("marks") are the property of TVA'. (A bit unclear - they don't
specify what material actually is copyright, and no copyright notices were
found, in a brief browse. )
Both TVA and EPA have content we'd love to use on Appropedia (about
sustainability and renewable energy) but obviously we can't do so if there's
any uncertainty about whether it's public domain.
Chris
--
Chris Watkins (a.k.a. Chriswaterguy)
Founding admin at Appropedia.org, the wiki of:
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Founding director, Appropedia Foundation, 501(c)(3)
Buy online through http://appropedia.maatiam.com (Amazon, eBay and more) and
a percentage of your purchase goes to Appropedia - at no extra cost to you.
The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment. - Tim Wirth
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