In the UK, can you search and learnscience materials from websites, found throught search engine eg google, even if the teaching material is not referenced accuratelly or at all (references towards the past scientific studies eg. This protein function is .... (Name, year) because I suppose the papers the information is from could be behind paywall, so it would be a copyright infregement by the website author, to use the info from the paper for teaching. But than wouldnt wikipedia also be going against copyright as some papers might be excluded from text references and wiki could use information in articles for the public to view, even if it is behind paywall. How would one differentiate which materials can be viewed and which cant? Eg. If you want to learn basic chemistry eg. Moles the academic papers would be really old and probably open access so it is okey to search and find websites teaching this info but it would not be okey for searching for something relatively new in the field and learning this from the individual website, wiki, articles? Does everything need to be referenced?
Asked
Active
Viewed 42 times
1 Answers
0
Copyright law does not protect information, it protects expression. So you can legally read a book and summarize the informational content online, if you write it yourself. More than once, parts of pages on Wiki are directly copied from other works, which then raises the question whether that constitutes "fair use".
There is a separate non-legal question about lousy academic standards of proof, where somebody make an unsupported factual assertion, which occasionally gets tagged (it depends on the user-pool that is monitoring Wiki).
user6726
- 217,973
- 11
- 354
- 589