Copyright Issues

The issue of copyrights is a sensitive one even aside from a welter of copyright laws which prevail in various countries. Certainly one does not wish to infringe on or compromise the commercial rights of authors or companies as owners of specific pieces of creative works. A rampant violation of such rights would deprive creators of just fruits of their labors and might have a chilling effect on creation of new content, particularly those which have very high commercial value (e.g. textbooks).

Arrayed against that is the common desire to make knowledge freely available to readers and scholars in all parts of the world. Works which are reasonably old - more than 20-30 years, say - suffer from another problem - lack of availability. Most of the works cited on this site are scattered across sources which are either not easily available or hidden behind barriers of technology and not easily reproduced.

We take a simple view on these issues. The present library is not designed for commercial use, nor do we encourage a commercial exploitation of these works under our doctrine of “free knowledge”. The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) provides for making “fair use” copies of copyrighted materials under certain conditions, including that the reproduction is not to be used commercially or “for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research.” We wish to abide by that. By accessing files housed on this site, you are agreeing to abide by these restrictions. If you do not agree, please do not download.

This collection may contain copyrighted material which has not been specifically authorized for our use. If any copyright owner objects to our inclusion of their material on this web site, please contact us with the relevant information and we will remove contested content promptly. We are not in the business of litigation but provision of easy access to a specific kind of knowledge. As someone said, “we are lovers, not fighters”.