> You're usually not going to want to reproduce so much of a work in your research that copyright law would come into play (you can legally paste a few sentence

> You're usually not going to want to reproduce so much of a work in your research that copyright law would come into play (you can legally paste a few sentences from a book on your blog IANAL). The content of the encyclopedia is still copyrighted material of the company - copyright law is always in effect. Also - when writing a program it would most likely be composed of different projects. I would find it very unlikely that you aren't using a library or piece of code that is copyrighted or licensed by someone else. > Often though a research paper fits into a category protected by fair use so you can anyway. You could still apply fair use for code - and if your derivative work is for non-commercial use then it would be hard to argue a copyright violation [1]. Especially if you tried to contact the author and didn't get a response. > But you can't reproduce and distribute an entire piece of copyright protected work just by providing a citation. I never said you could? > I hope you haven't done this. If you have, you should take everything down. I never said I did? You didn't express the big picture problem - if I release some unlicensed code into the wild and people start using it - does that give me the right to sue everyone on the planet? [1] http://ogc.harvard.edu/pages/copyright-and-fair-use http://ogc.harvard.edu/pages/copyright-and-fair-use [2] http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/intellectual-property/fair-use-law.html http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/intellectual-property/fair-...