July 1st. 1998

Screen design:
   M. Fritsch

Although I cannot imagine that authors of normal literature in the framework of teaching and learning will receive lots of money from their publishers, copyright issues in all academic institutions have been a costly discussion for all administrations. We should discuss the alternatives:

Here is the more or less traditional way of a copyright text from Prentice Hall Inc., a renown publisher; another example of a similar - but more friendly worded kind is Ernst&Young LLP.

A much more moderate form with less anxieties we found when browsing ICDLs database on Distance Education via telnet where directly on top of the article we read :
"This text is included in the database with permission. Copyright is retained by the author. Users of the database are permitted to make copies for their own research/study purposes. Copying into any other database, or for any other purpose is not permitted."
A similar text is included for the whole database today in ICDLs Web site: The International Centre for Distance Learning at the Open University.

A form how to cope with the copyright issue in a common way, i.e. to declare the possible legal usage of documents, can be found at the website of Creative Commons

There we have the two positions: I simply favour the latter one! The worldwide treaties on these issues are open for inspection at WIPO, Geneva. The easiest argument for "copyleft" on the WEB is that we do not "copy" any protected items, instead we send users to the original source: the only problem then is that we should check these links regularly. (Helmut Fritsch)