The only problem with eZines is they may not always be available in the future or be at the same Url. Website are ephemeral things and do have a habit of coming and going. A society may close or merge, a commercial effort may not prove profitable.

I don't think PDF's are saved by the wayback machine. Maybe the solution would be to create an local archive of these publications on our website.

Yesterday Clint Hyde came over and we installed his software on my server.  In the process we resolved some configuration issues and found one nasty bug that Clint's working on.  So this is not ready for prime-time, but it's moving along nicely.  (One example bug:  I was entering some test data from Feb 09 "Scale Rails", and the article title was "Monon's First Double Door Boxcar".  Turns out the apostrophe character is reserved in SQL, so the database returned an error when we handed it that text.  Typical early test/debug kinds of things...)

The implementation approach Clint is taking is minimalist.  He's using all open source components (and his code will probably be open source, not quite sure which OSS license yet.)  The web page itself has very little glitz, but has at least the functionality of the previous index.  

More importantly, the philosophy is to not depend on getting data from the previous index, although that would be A Good Thing if we can recover the data.  But there has to be a way to add stuff to the index no matter what, and working through both the technology and the business rules for this is part of the design work.  We've been discussing whether we want to add specific attribute classes.  The advantage is these help you in searching. The disadvantages are (a) the attribute values have to be added to the data (and that would be particularly true for extending information in the current index); (b) the query mechanism would get more complex (but I think we need that complexity in any event.)   

So we're not waiting on anyone here (lawyers or otherwise :-). 

Thanks to both of you for your hard work.  Can't wait to be able to help contribute to inputing data!

Ken L

So at this point no one is sure if Kalmbach is even going to release the data, correct?

What would be the legal hurtles of using index data that was "scrapped" from the site before it was taken down?

-GmG-

Last I heard, NMRA and Kalmbach were in negotiations.   Now I'm presuming Kalmbach is really acting altruistically here, but even under the best of circumstances, companies and organizations have to proceed carefully to make sure Intellectual Property and Liability issues are fully resolved.  

Of course, the next question is what NMRA would do with this when they get it.  One reason we (Clint, mostly) moved out is to take advantage of our knowledge of IT technical and business issues.  I don't want to presume NMRA has substantial expertise specifying, developing and managing these kinds of on-line systems.  So we figure the best thing to do is work it out and then hand NMRA a turn-key solution (assuming they're willing to host this.)  And if the NMRA for some reason has concerns/restrictions that we can't live with, our implementation will not be dependent on the NMRA, any more than it would be dependent on Kalmbach.

dave

John,

I have posted your request to the JMRI Users group. They created and improve the JMRI DecoderPro, PanelPro software suite. It is open source and users of DecoderPro and PanelPro are pretty active. DecoderPro is one of the most widely used FREE programmers used for DCC.

Hopefully, this will alert a lot of people to your idea. Great solution.

Regards,

Nick Kulp

 Kalmbach had a copyright notice on the original site but as my understanding is that you cannot copyright a collection of factual data like a telephone directory. The reason for this is, I think, that however you produce a list of factual data it is going to be identical with any other set of the same data as it based on facts that don't change. If it WAS protected by copyright, the first person to produce the list would have a unfair monopoly. 

So the most they can claim copyright on would be the layout of the site, if you don't duplicate that they would have no claim.

Two other factors would protect you anyway, the data is factual, you could get exactly the same results by re-keying the data as scrapping the site so it would be a hard thing to prove in court that that was the way you had obtained it.

Secondly Kalmbach have already decided this data does not have a large commercial value, otherwise they would have paid some consultancy firm loads of money to transfer the data. Taking some to court for a copyright claim is even more serious money. Good intellectual property lawyers do not come cheap. Look at what the RIAA have spent recently.

Of course all this is academic unless we know of someone who has  successfully scraped the site.

You can copyright software ... And data without software to present it (especially when this data uses a custom binary format integral to the software) ... is of rather limited value.

 Joe, You've missed two important points, firstly if you had web scrapped the program you have extracted the underlying data Not the program. You would need your own version of the program to display that data which you would have to write yourself

Secondly if Kalmbach did have a copyright on that data we would be in the deep doo-doo.

If I make a copy of a Harry Potter book and print it, I'm going to get sued for copyright. It does not matter if I keyed in all the words in myself or photocopied it, it's the fact that I am producing something which is substantially the same in content as the original. It does not matter if I change a few words here and there , I would still be infringing.

This is why copyright only applies to artistic creations and not  collections of facts. The actual wording the copyright office uses is:-

What Is Not Protected by Copyright?

...Works consisting entirely of information that is common property
and containing no original authorship (for example: standard
calendars, height and weight charts, tape measures and rulers, and
lists or tables taken from public documents or other common sources.)

source :http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf

Now this may sound fairly limited, but the courts have interpreted it to have a much wider meaning. Like Most aspects of copyright the exact answer is somewhat murky and would probably only be decided for certain in a court of law for which you would need deep pockets and a penchant for  gambling. 

Please note I am not a lawyer, just a man who found himself at the wrong end copyright case at one point.(over, of all things, the ownership of posts on a forum!)

Tom

Hi all;

I'm very happy to see this project going forward. A quick note, while I'm not a lawyer, my understanding is that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act DID in fact extend copyright to collections of data. While it might be difficult to ensure volunteers don't submit data from other sources, it is safest to clearly state for this project that data should NOT be drived from other sources than the origial magazines. That includes the older Stephanes(?) printed index or other computer programs.

I also hope that whereever this ends up being hosted, the originators retain rights and copies so that if anything changes, we don't go through this process again!

Pieter Roos