Bulbs for Garden Habitats

Jane McGary janemcgary@earthlink.net
Sat, 26 Mar 2005 11:40:19 PST
Ellen Hornig's statement about fair use of Internet postings and published 
material is correct. I did not say, or intend to imply, that Glattstein had 
misused her sources in any legal sense. Attribution by name is frequent in 
her text.

My point was that a bibliography should have been included, and that 
explicit mention of the PBS and perhaps Alpine-L should have been made in a 
prominent place, such as the Acknowledgments. This is not a legal issue, 
but a social one. Ellen is correct that one doesn't expect citations in 
general-audience periodical journalism, but my feeling as a book editor who 
has worked both in academia and in other publishing is that book 
publication, even when for a general audience as this one is, should be 
held to a somewhat higher standard.

Jane McGary

Ellen wrote:

>As far as I know, anything published on the web (in a venue accessible to
>the public) becomes part of the public domain, and can be freely quoted
>(which is different from being presented a sone's own work - that would
>still be plagiarism); and certainly other published writings may always be
>quoted without the writer's permission, as long as the source is
>acknowledged.  I do understand that in academic writing these quotes would
>need to be formally footnoted - I was an academic myself for 13 years - but
>in journalism, if that's the correct description of Judy's books, footnotes
>are certainly not the norm.  The parallel I would use is that when someone
>speaks at a public gathering, their words are commonly reproduced in the
>press with attribution, but not with express permission  -that would only
>be needed if the talk were "off the record", which PBS and published
>writings clearly are not.
>
>Thus, while I would agree that under the circumstances a bibliography
>citing sources used, even if such sources are not cited individually in the
>text, would have been a good thing, I really don't see where the express
>permission of the source would in any of the cases mentioned have been
>required, unless the source gave the information to Judy in an unpublished
>format (private correspondence or unpublished letters, documents or
>scholarship).



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