In article <mailman.5959.1390611612.18130.python-l...@python.org>, Ben Finney <ben+pyt...@benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> bob gailer <bgai...@gmail.com> writes: > > > On 1/24/2014 5:05 AM, theguy wrote: > > > I would post the code, but I don't know if it's fine to put it here, > > > as it contains pieces from books. I do believe that would go against > > > copyright laws. > > > AFAIK copyright laws apply to reproducing something for profit. > > That's a common misconception that has never been true. > > <URL:http://www.faqs.org/faqs/law/copyright/myths/part1/> > > Copyright is a legal monopoly in a work, reserving a large set of > actions to the copyright holders. Without license from the copyright > holders, or an exemption under the law, you cannot legally perform those > actions. [The rest of this post is based on my "I am not a lawyer" understanding of the law. Also, this is based on US copyright law; things may be different elsewhere, and I haven't the foggiest idea what law applies to an international forum such as this] On the other hand (where Ben Finney's post is the first hand), there is the Fair Use Doctrine (FUD), which grants certain exemptions. The US Copyright Office has a page (http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html) about this. As a real-life example, I believe I can safely invoke the FUD to quote the leading paragraphs from today's New York Times and New York Post articles about the same event and give their Fleish-Kincaid Reading Ease and Grade Level scores, if I was comparing the writing style of the two newspapers: ---------------------------------------------- NY Times: The crime gripped the publicâs imagination, for both its magnitude and its moxie: In the predawn hours of Dec. 11, 1978, a group of masked gunmen seized about $6 million in cash and jewels from a cargo building at Kennedy International Airport. Reading Ease Score: 56.6 Grade Level: 10.6 ---------------------------------------------- NY Post: On Dec. 11, 1978, armed mobsters stole $5 million in cash and nearly $1 million in jewels from a Lufthansa airlines vault at JFK Airport, in what would be for decades the biggest-ever heist on US soil. Reading Ease Score: 76.2 Grade Level: 7.3 ---------------------------------------------- The scores above were computed by http://www.readability-score.com/ In my opinion, this meets all of the requirements of the FUD. I'm quoting short passages, and using them to critique the writing styles of the two papers. In the OP's case, he's analyzing published works as input to a text analysis algorithm. In my personal opinion, posting samples of those texts, for the purpose of discussing how his algorithm works, would be well within the bounds of Fair Use.
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