As far as I know, there have not been any copyright cases involving, for
example, the use of wordlists, concordance searches etc. and so the
situation is unclear. Since the percentage of the corpus that you would
want to use in any publication would be small and since you would not be
hurting sales of the original work, then you might think that you are on
safe ground. On the other hand, you would be using something that belongs
to someone else without paying them for it.
By the way, you shouldn't assume that the lack of a copyright symbol means
that the material is up for grabs. The creators of materials hold the
copyright even if they don't "assert" it.
Are you going to use the collected material to write research papers? As
an academic, I definitely believe that we should continue to follow our
"research work" without getting too fearful of copyright law.
> 2. Apart from 'Is it legal?', I want to ask, 'Is it ethical?' to do
> this?
I guess I am responding to this post because the ethical question is one
that I have considered. As a publisher, I sell a corpus that contains the
talk of academics in the U.S. The original transcripts are in the public
domain, but I approached the institutions involved and told them what I
planned to do. The response was interesting given the focus on individual
rights in America; essentially it was that public money was funding these
events (even if it was a faculty meeting) and therefore the "productions"
could be used in any way I wanted. In addition, there is in one set of
trancripts an explicit acknowledgement (or warning) that the discussions
were being transcribed and would be made public.
Perhaps it is unethical to sell the words of academics, but given this
background I have convinced myself that it is okay. It is interesting to
ponder what I would have done if the transcripts had been of faculty
meetings at an English university, which are also mostly funded with
public money but seem much more private somehow.
Michael
In Ugly but Warm Houston
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Michael Barlow, Department of Linguistics, Rice University
barlow@rice.edu www.ruf.rice.edu/~barlow
Athelstan barlow@athel.com www.athel.com (U.S.) www.athelstan.com (UK)