Ed Poor wrote:
I beg you to donate this passage, which is from your book "Trust Us We're Experts" to Wikipedia, Sheldon. May we have your permission to incorporate it into the [[pseudoscience]] article?
Feel free to use or adapt it as you see fit. However, the Wikipedia article already contains most of the ideas in the passage I cited. It already mentions Karl Popper, it already talks about "falsifiability," and it has quite a bit of other information that is actually quite a bit more detailed than the passage I quoted from my book.
For that matter, what are the legal technicalities involved in the case where a published author wants to donate a tiny portion of a copyrighted work, to the public via the GPL? (I'm not saying Sheldon would want to do so in this case: this is brilliant prose, and he's entitled to make money off it; more power to him!)
I'm not an attorney, but U.S. copyright law, as spelled out in 17 USC 107, says that "fair use of a copyrighted work...for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching..., scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright." It goes on to specify the following criteria to be used in judging whether the use made of a work constitutes fair use:
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
With regard to points (1) and (4), Wikipedia would be on solid ground in quoting brief excerpts from a book or other published work of significant length. Wikipedia isn't a commercial venture, and a brief quotation or adaptation from a book wouldn't hurt sales. Assuming attribution is given, it would probably *contribute* to sales. No harm, no foul.
I'm not sure what point (2) is intended to address, but I think it applies to unauthorized use of confidential documents or trade secrets.
On point (3), the "amount and substantiality" of an excerpt is subject to varying court interpretations, depending on the nature of the work. Quoting a brief poem in its entirety could be a copyright violation, but a 1,000-word passage from a book probably isn't.
If you wish to research this further, the following URLs may help:
http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/clasguid.htm http://www.law.emory.edu/6circuit/nov96/96a0357p.06.html