Last Updated August 23, 2002

Statement of Copyright

Why would someone copyright a web page? The same reason as some would copyright anything else: to prevent another person from taking an author’s work and calling it their own, and to allow the author to profit (or otherwise benefit) from his/her original efforts.

Motivations

So, for example, suppose I wrote a detailed discussion of some arcane academic topic such as a review and evaluation of goodness-of-fit indices in structural equation modeling. And then suppose I wanted to use that as a basis for a later journal article or book chapter on the topic, since, like all research-oriented academics, my career advancement is heavily influenced by my publication track record. Then suppose the article was rejected, because someone else had taken my words and already published them, perhaps changing them a little to make it look less obvious. How would you feel?

It should be noted that under copyright law, most work is automatically considered the property of the author even without a specific copyright notice; the inclusion of such notices is provided as a reminder to discourage copying. So you can go after someone who steals your work even if you don’t say "Copyright © 1996 Pat Jones."

Fair Use

The copyright law of the United States (and other developed countries) allows for the doctrine of "fair use," which is particularly broad for academic research and scholarship. You can read it, quote it, and use it to prepare other materials. For example, much of the work I’ve done in these pages on structural equations has been by reading through stacks of copyrighted books and journal articles, and such compilation, summary and synthesis are considered "fair use."

The difference between fair use and plagiarism should be a matter of common sense, and generally people know when they’re abusing it. But if you’re not sure, please feel free to ask.

Additional Uses

In addition to fair use, with regards to these particular web pages, I grant these additional rights to my work:

1. Except as noted, the right to reprint or otherwise redistribute this work in printed form, as long as the original source and author are clearly identified. So print it out, make copies for your friends, etc. However, for purposes of online publication or other electronic distribution, I ask that you link to the original instead.
2. The right to link to this work, which for some odd reason various content providers (e.g., magazines and newspapers) do not always grant.

Linking and the Permanency of Links

A word of caution on linking: these pages are subject to change and may be moved or renamed, so the URL you include on your web page may (as with references to any other site) someday become obsolete.

To minimize such problems, I will attempt to maintain permanency of URL’s within two guidelines:

• I suggest that you only link to one of the specific committed links provided in a separate list;
• Also, I’d suggest you use my symbolic reforwarder address (http://pobox.com) instead of the actual machine name, since the name of the machine has changed once and could conceivably change again.

So the links

http://pobox.com/~joelwest/Asia

http://pobox.com/~joelwest/Management

are (relatively) permanent, while links such as

are more likely to become obsolete.

If you link to any of these pages, please send me an E-mail letting me know what you’ve linked to, and I’ll try to let you know if something changes.

Comments

Of course, as with all the other web pages I’ve written, I welcome your comments, questions and feedback on this discussion of copyright.

This page prepared by Joel West of San José State University, College of Business. Please send any comments to <west_j@cob.sjsu.edu>.