Dear Brian, Peter, Spencer, Thanks for your comments, which have cleared things up a little for me. The thing I find most confusing about copyright is that it is emergent, not atomic - ie. if you split a copyrighted work into small enough pieces (eg. letters, pixels) those pieces are no longer copyrightable. It is the combination of those small pieces into a specific form that is important, and the definition of derivative works seems to help define what rearrangement of those pieces is still covered under copyright.
The specific case that I am interested in creating new data sets from publically available data (itself stored in copyrightable works) - in my case to produce interesting data sets to use in class. For example, each individual page on ebay is copyrightable, but if I extract the price, name and category from (say) 200 pages, does the copyright of that dataset belong to ebay? I'm quite comfortable using that data personally, or for a class, but if I want to publish it (ie. in jse) do I need to get permission? Similarly, if I take a few mp3's and calculate some summary statistics for them, would that constitute a derivative work? Hadley ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
