[openbeos] Re: Practical File System Design PDF distribution

Jorge Mare wrote:

On Sat, Aug 9, 2008 at 12:56 PM, Cyan <cyanh256@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Dominic released it into public domain, AFAIK (it is available on
his site). And he is the author. But I don't know how legal or not
it is for us to have it on our site. We can just link it to his
site if that's a problem. :)

If he definitely released it as Public Domain (PD), then there's
nothing to worry about, as by doing so he relinquished all rights
to the material.

However the term "public domain" is often mis-used to mean "freely
available but under copyright", in which case he (or the publisher)
retains full legal control over any copying (a.k.a. distribution).

So perhaps counter-intuitively, just because it's freely available
online doesn't mean it can be re-posted without infringement.
Linking to his site or obtaining permission to host it are the only
safe ways to handle it.


As already stated by Dominc himself, he does have the right to
redistribute the PDF.

Whether that right extends to others still remains to be seen. I am
discussing this with Elsevier and Dominic is helping out clarify the
situation with them.

For now the file is off our server and linked to Dominic's webpage instead.

Jorge
Dominic's email was just to you, me, and Michael, so unless one of you two posted it to the list, most people don't know about his comments. :-) For the uninformed, basically Dominic basically said that he'd work out the issue with Elsevier, and that he most definitely has the right to distribute the file. Elsevier, in my opinion, should probably also just do a search on Google to find all the other places that the file has been posted, and if they're going to harass Haiku, they should get started harassing the other sites too. 

Raymond

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