rearenginekarts.com

Removed by author at the request of site administrator due to legal concerns

FYI - there are copyright laws, the owner of that website had better be careful.

Usually copyright owners don't go after the people that download the stuff, but as we all know from previous actions, sometimes they do.

Generally, stuff from the early period of karting falls under one set of copyright laws, and stuff from the later period falls under a more strict set of laws. The later stuff doesn't even need to carry a copyright mark to be legally copyrighted, the earlier stuff does.

Just so everyone knows, in the past I have had many people offer up article and document scans, but had to turn them away because of copyright laws. I have always wanted to include more vintage document and mag scans on this site and the VKA site, but it is hard to find someone willing to chase down the current copyright owners and obtain written permissions to post their material. Sometimes you just can't locate the owners, going ahead and republishing their work runs the risk of an owner emerging at a later time with their lawyer. It is really easy to scan the stuff, but much harder to get proper permissions, but I guess getting sued would be the most exhausting of all, LOL!

Jeff

Hi Jeff-
I do not believe we are doing anything wrong under the Fair Use clause of the Copyright Act of 1976. The intent for making this information available would fall under the scholarship or research wording outlined in the code below. I have removed any reference to the site from both REAR and VKA as you requested.

Respectfully,
Dan Flanders

Title17>Chapter1
§ 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

Cann't help people research there hobby event if they do it for nothing? But can overwhem us with ebay on the sites and make money? $
Can make event rules, but cann't inforce them? $
I do not know where Vintage karts is going but I do not like the current look of it!!

I hope to see you all at the new site they have worked to hard to start it and looked into these concerns before hand.


Ron Cubel

If anyone didn't see the web address before it was taken down, e-mail me at voxnut@hotmail.com and I'll give it to you. It's a great effort and a very well done site for anyone who cares about the history of karting.

Dean

Sure it's hard work to set up a website and scan a bunch of copyrighted materials, but the real hard work is obtaining the permissions from the copyright owners, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing legally! Below I pasted the message to Dan I placed on the VKA site. I'm sorry, if some are unhappy about this, I don't make the laws, YOUR government does. Don't complain to me about it. It's really quite simple, if someone wants to distribute someone elses copyrighted materials legally, you get permission to do so, like I did for this site. If it really was legal to make copies of copyrighted materials for uses that were truely educational, then every school in this country could save a TON of money by buying just one copy of each text book and make copies for all the other students! People just want to believe that the Fair Use laws allow such things to be possible, they don't, read the links I pasted below, they explain the law. I can't condone illegal activities by allowing someone to place a link here for the purpose of illegally distributing copyrighted materials.

Message from VKA forum, pasted below:
Dan,
Anyone in this situation should check with their lawyer instead of taking advice from a message board, but you will find the links below useful.

Here is one website with what they call the top 10 myths of copyrights:
http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html

Note, myth 2 and 4. IMO, I can't see how anyone could justify Fair Use, if they are distributing thousands of copies so others can avoid having to buy the original works. The fair use clause pertains to very specific situations and then not usually whole works.

and here is a good summary of copyright laws according to dates and whether the copyright notice is present or not:
http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/public_domain/

(note that most likely all of us will be dead by the time copyrights expire on these karting documents we are talking about)

Determining what is public domain can be difficult, but some of our vintage karting documents are public domain. I made that argument to Wayne H years ago concerning his attempt at enforcing copyrights he owned on McCulloch literature, he backed down and admitted some of it was public domain (much of it is not though).

Jeff

Jeff and I talked about doing this years ago. My idea was to scan all the kart test articles and put in a nice folder so you could go to YXZ kart and look up the kart test that had colors, options, caster, camber, etc..... We decided not to as it was much to much work running all the info down.