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Re: Quoting copyrighted material in a tech manual?
Subject:Re: Quoting copyrighted material in a tech manual? From:Laura Lemay <lemay -at- lauralemay -dot- com> To:techwr-l <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Tue, 17 Jun 2014 11:00:19 -0700
My first reaction is no, NO AIIEEE do not do this. Even if you acquired the permissions to quote, there is likely a fee you will need to pay depending on the amount of content you're excerpting. If you do this the wrong way you are opening your company up to a lot of liability.
But as others have mentioned, your legal team can provide advice on whether this is OK at all and how to get the permissions.
For what it's worth I have yet to come across a problem similar to this in documentation that could not be solved by a. providing less conceptual material and just referring to other docs (IMHO conceptual and background material in docs is most likely to be skipped by readers) or b. Just rewriting the content I want to include.
Laura
On Jun 17, 2014, at 7:06 AM, Jim Witkin <jameswitkin -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
> I'm writing a manual that provides a fair amount of context material. For
> some of this material, I'm hoping to use excerpts from a published
> scientific book (quite well known in the field) which I assume is
> copyrighted material. If I provide a footnote and full attribution to the
> book and publisher, does that cover me legally? Or will I need to approval
> from the publisher to quote the book?
>
> Thanks.
>
>
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