Copyright is the legal exclusive right of the author of a work to control the copying of that work. Most information on the web and elsewhere concerns whether or not your using something (especially, these days, material from the web) is a violation of the creator’s copyright. Here, we are concerned with ensuring we do not violate your copyright rights when you contribute data to the ANC.
The reason for this is that in the USA, almost everything created privately and originally after April 1, 1989 is copyrighted to the creator and protected whether it has a copyright notice or not. Therefore, if you produce a document, web page, or any other work, you own the copyright unless you have either
- explicitly transferred ownership to another entity (e.g., a publisher) in a contract or other legal document, or
- explicitly put it in the public domain, using a notice such as “I grant this to the public domain.”
Unless you have put your document in the public domain (in which case we can include it in the ANC with no problem), we therefore must have your permission to include it in the ANC and re-distribute it. By contributing a text through the ANC upload page, you agree to the license agreement at the bottom of this page. Agreeing to this license does not transfer copyright to the ANC.
If you have any qualms, please consult the Frequently Asked Questions page to learn why granting us the right to include your document does not put you in danger of others reproducing or “stealing” your work. If you still have qualms. note that documents may be contributed in part, for example, by extracting non-contiguous segments, such as chapters 1,2,4,5,8,9 from a book. However, to be useful for linguistic analysis, we only include extracts that are relatively long and coherent in the ANC–that is, we cannot use “every other sentence” in a text, but “every other chapter” is fine.
For more information about copyright, we refer you to Brad Templeton’s A brief intro to copyright and 10 Big Myths about copyright explained.