While I'm most definitely not a lawyer, I'm quite certain that posting snippets of books is considered Fair Use and is perfectly legal. If your lawyer is slick you could probably even convince a judge that your quoting a text was for educational purposes which is also a copyright exception under fair use.

So I'm pretty sure it's not a problem.

local $_ = "0A72656B636148206C72655020726568746F6E41207473754A";
while(s/..$//) { print chr(hex($&)) }
[download]

A very good article outlining Fair Use (which is a very grey legal area) is availible here. Going by what the article says, limited quoting from published sources is acceptable in the context of this site because 1) we are only quoting bits n' pieces (as oposed to significant chunks of the full work) 2) we aren't profiting by quoting the chunks 3) we aren't FUing the copyright holder's ability to profit from his/her work and 4) (and this is a little dicey, but) this site is primarily an educational resource (although, legality wise, I'd stick with the first 3 points rather than rely on #4, which is quite a bit weaker.)

Yeah, yeah, IANAL, but I've had a lot of classroom (as teacher and student) and lit mag (writer and editor) involvement, so Ive spent a fair amount of time researching Fair Use. ( and i would have gotten away for it if it weren't for those darn kids and their IP attorney dog . . . )

The Autonomic Pilot; it's FunkyTown, babe.

I've always considered book quoting the same way we considered it in college: Quote, quote, quote, but reference, reference, reference. As long as we aren't passing the work off as our own, we aren't infringing on copyright, I believe.

Passing snippets of code or text, with a reference to the book is okay, I believe. But IANAL!!!!

J. J. Horner
Linux, Perl, Apache, Stronghold, Unix
jhorner@knoxlug.org http://www.knoxlug.org/

Very little of the text in Learning Perl comes from perldoc, while nearly all of Programming Perl does. However, I'm sure you should keep quoting to a minimum unless it's from perldoc and you attribute it properly.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Sure, merlyn, I don't want to infringe any copyright stuff.

But what's about perldoc? Is this copyrighted? I don't think so. Am I wrong?

It think you're talking about the Camel book here. Whilst it's true that the camel and perldoc do have a lot of text in common, they are both under copyright and subject to the usual restrictions.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

European Perl Conference - Sept 22/24 2000, ICA, London
<http://www.yapc.org/Europe/>