Copyright cry for help! A faculty member needs an illustration of a normal curve, any normal curve, for an article she is submitting to a journal. If the journal makes you pay for access, would that violate the non-commercial clause of a Creative Commons license?
Cera
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um. ok. stupid question. why doesn't said faculty member break out R or SPSS or STATA and just graph it? then they would own the copyright
- Christina Pikas
It's not a stupid question. But they don't have the software nor, most likely, the skillset.
- Mark Kille
Likelihood that a graph of a normal curve is copyrightable? Very low. On the totally orthogonal hand, a toll-access journal (esp if for-profit) may indeed not be a satisfactory venue for someone who granted a CC license for noncommercial use...
- N. Ansi
Nice. Problem solved! Though, really, any graph of normally-distributed data is likely to be copyright free. No "original expression". People _act_ like they're copyrightable, but they're probably not. There was just a good court case about this, about academic papers, no less! I keep meaning to blog about it, but haven't yet. (Graphs that, in the words of one of my favorite instructors "look like they're wearing pajamas"... now those may be copyrightable. I like to use this one http://thisisindexed.com/2009... to provoke discussion about copyrightability.)
- N. Ansi
thanks everyone!
- Mark Kille