I keep seeing stuff about copyright worries and reposting things from books, articles et. al. While I'm no lawyer, I did a little research on Copyright laws when I worked as a computer tech in my college's library. I didn't go in depth, but I believe that it is not a copyright violation if you are reproducing an article or section of a book, with proper quotation punctuation and article information for a non-commercial publication (which the FML could clearly be defined as). The article information in the case of the NY Times article, would have to include (at the very least) the authors name, the proper title of the article, the publication it appeared in and the issue, section and page the article appeared on. It could also include, although I don't think this is _absolutely_ necessary for a well known publication like the NY Times, the publisher's info which would be taken from the second or third page of the publication. If the post includes all of these things and is properly quoted, then I don't think there is any danger of copyright law violation. If there is anybody out there who knows more about this, please let us know. [Moderator's note: The article as sent to the FML didn't include most of what you say is required, but of course I could have corrected that. You may very well be correct that it would be OK - I simply don't know for sure and my primary goal here is to keep the FML alive and myself and CUNY out of trouble even if that means erring on the side of caution. If I get a definite opinion from, say, CUNY's legal department, I will let you know. BIG] One note though. (This is true, at least for college papers where they call it plagarism, but is still copyright violation.) A paraphrase of an article without the proper acknoledgements to the original author and/or direct quotation where non-common words or phrases from the original are used because translation is not possible, _is_ a copyright violation as far as I know. Regarding the NY Times article, it is stated at the very end of the article that the case was brought against the city by ferret owners in response to a case brought against one ferret owner for refusing to turn in his pet to authorities. The case started 3 years ago (according to info in the article) and ended up in Federal Court (I am assuming based on the fact that a federal judge ruled). My guess is that in the case of a suit being filed against a city government (the ban was brought by the NY city government not just the Health Dept.), the courts in that jurisdiction are probably not considered impartial as the local court system is run by the city. I'm assuming (I know I shouldn't be, but I wish I had fact) that a case like this would go to Federal Court for an impartial ruling. Either that, or some of the information we are missing is that after going through the appeals process in city court, they probably hit the maximum number of appeals on the same case and had to appeal to a higher court. Any lawyers or law buffs out there who can corroborate or refute these assumptions? Sorry this was long and only slightly about ferrets. Jim Makowski [Posted in FML issue 1101]