On Nov 27, 11:58 am, Donald Alan Morrison <donmorri...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, I started a new thread because the topic had changed. You are > quite fond of pointing out topic changes on sage-polemic. Ah, my search for prior references (to DLMF) somehow did not bring to my attention the OEIS thread. I only spotted notes from 2008. But now I see. > > > Please top post a reply, and we can have Dave chime in on that > too. :-) Sure. middle, too. > > > why don't you just look at the copyright info. > > It says > > > Bulk copying,reproduction, or redistribution in any form is not > > permitted. > > >http://dlmf.nist.gov/about/notices#S4 > > Because the central point that Robert Dodier made is that it should be > in the public domain as it was funded with federal money (not sure if > that's necessarily true); It certainly was not the case for Macsyma, initially, which was funded by federal money. Much of the work published in scientific journals is funded by federal money, and yet journals do not give away copies.. Now the situation with NIST is not that it was federally funded, but that the work was done under the direction of a federal agency (with consultants presumably doing work for hire.) Does that place the work in the public domain? Probably not, but I am not a lawyer. > but since I'm interested in such an > eventuality, that's why I would want to ask them for a formal > explanation on public record. FOIA requests get answered by lawyers, > not webmasters. As I see it, FOIA makes documents available for inspection or copying. Since NIST appears to have nothing much hidden wrt DLMF, my guess is that FOIA will not be useful ... you will get copies of the pages you already have, including the page with the copyright on it. (for $0.50/page.) Now I suppose that there is a possibility that if you requested the DLMF via FOIA, then that copy would not be covered by copyright, regardless of what it says. That would be interesting. But wouldn't it be better to just contact Dan Lozier and ask him nicely for permission to redistribute DLMF? I would personally object strongly if DLMF were restricted by GPL. Of course you could get a copy of DLMF and restrict YOUR copy. RJF -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
