I've been following this discussion with interest, and have a few thoughts...

The first is wondering what the reasoning behind this is? Is it the
fear that people at your organisation are going to be stealing other
people's material for display on your site, or that they are going to
be linking to pages and passing them off as their own - or more to
the point, to provide protection in case someone accuses them of this?

At 1:08 pm +0000 15/2/01, WEBMASTER wrote:
>The following guidelines are being considered here for all colleagues
>constructing web pages.
>
>Comments would be welcome. 1, 3 and 4 seem pretty straightforward, but as main
>college webby I'm concerned about point 3.
>
>1) That paper based or e-mail, authorised permission is given for the use in
>your materials of all images and documents, or extracts thereof,
>that are drawn
>from ANY other sources ( whatever their original format).

There is a well-known copyright clause that allows copying brief
passages from the works of others, so long as you provide proper
attribution. So if you want to pull a paragraph into a page of yours,
it would be just like publishing in any other medium - if kept brief
and properly cited, you don't need permission. For lengthier quotes,
maybe. Mileage may vary. If it's *very* long, you'd be better off
paraphrasing, then citing chapter and verse of a printed work, or
linking to a web page.

However, if your pulling graphics from a site, I would say definitely
ask permission.  I have also asked permision from other educational
sites to use large chunks of text and a web page structure in the
case of basic "introduction to the Internet" tutorial I had to put
together once, and an example of which I found that seemed perfect
elsewhere. The site administrator quite happily gave me permission to
use as much of it as I wanted, and I quite happily gave his
institution credit on the pages I adapted from his material.

>
>2) That a copy of the authorisation is stored with the ILT Team, along with a
>copy of the original document / image and a copy of the electronic
>format of the
>document / image for future reference. If possible details of where
>the copy is
>then used should also be placed with this.

This hinges on 1) above.

>
>3) We are now advised that permission should be sought for every external link
>to ANY other website. Could you please therefore follow steps 1 & 2 above for
>all links as well.

Assuming that this means you are required to get permission to link
to other sites, not, as Brian assumed, that other people need
permission to link to you.

If you are really concerned about being accused of passing other's
pages off as your own, you would be better to require not the above,
but that a disclaimer be attached to individual links and to lists of
links. You know the drill, "The following link(s) leads to a page not
located on the server of Dudley College, who are not responsible for
the content of links leading off site" blah, blah, blah. This might
be a hassle, but less of a hassle than contacting the site
administrator of every single web page you might want to link to. You
could even put a disclaimer in the "title" attribute of the A HREF
tag, to the effect that "this link leads to the XYZ web site, and
copyright of the material found there rests with" blah blah blah.

>4) Permissions are usually accepted provided that you contact the
>administrator
>of the website ( details will be somewhere on a web site). It is preferable to
>do this in e-mail and that within your message you make it clear
>that a) this is
>for educational use and b) you will credit all sources and permissions within
>your document.

See above.

Hope all this helps a little.

Paul
--
*************************************************************
Paul Milne
EDINA Documentation Officer        Tel:   +44 (0)131 650 4626
Ext. 504626                        Fax:   +44 (0)131 650 3308
EDINA <http://edina.ed.ac.uk/>     email: [log in to unmask]
University of Edinburgh
"An optimist sees a glass that's half full. A pessimist sees a glass
that's half empty.
An engineer sees a glass that's twice as big as it needs to be."