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I would say the answer is yes and no to
both questions.
What is the copyright law relating to one person sending a PDF to
another person who does not have access to
the full text of the article.
Whether it is within the law or not
depends on the publisher’s conditions and licence agreements. Some
documents are freely available.
Is copyright law really stifling our ability as development
practitioners to work for the common good?
You need to consider why there is a copyright law.
Copyright is there to ensure that authors and publishers get a fair return for
their work. If authors and reviewers were not paid for their work and
costs of publication and distribution were not met there would be considerable
drop in the availability of published material. This would also stifle
development practitioners working for the common good.
Margaret Rowley
Head of Knowledge Management
Worcestershire Health ICT Services
Rowlands Library
Charles Hastings Education Centre
WR5 1DD
Tel: 01905 760601 (direct)
01905 763333 ext 33765
Mob:07788 415799
Fax: 01905 760866 (direct)
33761 (internal)
Email: [log in to unmask]
From:
UK medical/ health care library community / information workers [mailto:
Sent: 06 April 2009 10:03
To:
Subject: Copyright query
Dear colleagues,
I would like to ask about what the copyright law is relating to one person
sending a PDF to another person who does not have access to
the full text of the article. It seems that everyone is doing it. There is even
one email group, Free-for-All, where this appears to be the main purpose.
By way of introduction, I am the coordinator of the HIFA2015 campaign and
co-director of the Global Healthcare Information Network. I started my career
as a hospital doctor in the
To achieve our goal, it is important that members are able to exchange
occasional articles as PDFs, so that we can reach a shared analysis of
information needs of healthcare providers in developing countries, and how to
meet them. Such exchange does not imply that the PDFs are reproduced on the
web, nor that they are distributed to the group. We are talking specifically,
for example, about one member being able to send another member a PDF.
My initial informal inquiries suggest that members simply can't do this for
copyrighted materials. Is that really true? Is copyright law really stifling
our ability as development practitioners to work for the common good?
I hear others talk about 'fair use' in relation to dialogue for humanitarian
reasons, yet my understanding of 'fair use' is that it
does not extend to allow sharing of knowledge for humanitarian or international
development purposes.
I apologise for the fact that I am a novice in the area of copyright and these
subjects have doubtless been covered on this list many times before. Apologies
for duplication...
Best wishes,
Dr Neil
Pakenham-Walsh MB,BS
Coordinator, HIFA2015 Campaign
Co-director, Global Healthcare Information Network
Charlbury,
Tel: +44 (0)1608 811338
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web (GHI-net): http://www.ghi-net.org
Web (HIFA2015): http://www.hifa2015.org
Web (HIFA 2009 Challenge): http://www.hifa2015.org/2009-challenge
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