Subject: My WWW philosophy & ethics

From: dwells (Don Wells)
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 94 14:54:27 EDT

Friends,

I (mostly) agree with Bob that making resources visible on the Net is
very nearly the same thing as putting them in the public domain.
However, I also agree with Andre that ethical guidelines are needed.

In particular, acknowledging sources of information is a traditional
scholarly courtesy, and should certainly be a key item in our
guidelines.  I also agree that making copies of pages without
notifying the original owner is generally a bad practice. (Somebody
out there copied my pages many months ago, because my HTTP server gets
a steady stream of requests for obsolete URLs; I have installed
symbolic links to stop some of the error messages.)

Regarding the the SIMBAD-via-ADS situation: did Michael Naumann get
that URL from one of our pages?  If so, we should probably delete it.

Many months ago, when I was accumulating URLs in my pages, I looked at
Bob's and Hans-Martin's pages. I got ideas from them. Should I have
added a credit line for the ideas? I don't know.  I don't think that I
literally copied any text from either of them, but I *may* have
clicked on some of their URLs, and then cut information out of the
Mosaic windows of the resources themselves to construct my
pages. I.e., I may have made use of some of their information
indirectly; I cannot remember whether I did or not. If I did follow
their links in some cases, should I have given them credit for that?
Currently, my ethical position on that question is "no", but I am
still nervous about this particular issue.  A current example is the
resource pages of a person at Cambridge, I think his name is Karl
Glazebrook ("kgb"). I looked at his pages, and found only resources
which we already have, with one notable exception. He has a
departmental record for UCL, and we don't. I was tempted to follow
that link and construct a record, but I didn't, _precisely because it
made me uneasy from an ethical point of view_. So, I ask you (plural):
should we (AstroWeb) add this record?

Another specific case to consider is the record for Jodrell Bank,
which includes a link with the string "EVN-TWG Meeting". This
particular string is my test case for deciding whether someone has
copied the HTML source of my (now our) resource pages. (This use is
somewhat like Andre 'salting' his databases with deliberate errors to
detect copyright violations.) This set of HTML pages can only be found
by a search of the anonymous-FTP directory tree at Jodrell, so it is
improbable that anyone else would create this exact link and text
string independently. I am unsure whether the owner intended for these
pages to become widely known.  Because I am not on the EVN mailing
list I am unsure whether even the EVN people know about the pages. I
still wonder, was I wrong to create this link?  Recently I discovered
that yet another radio observatory has HTML pages in their anonFTP
server, and I chose not to create a link to those pages because of my
uncertainty about the ethics of linking to arbitrary objects that
appear in the anonFTP space (and also because, in this particular
case, I suspected that the observatory will soon make a formal
announcement).

I do not necessarily regard all copying of HTML source text without
credit to be completely unethical. It really depends on the
situation. In particular, if someone adds resource records which he
has discovered to records which he has copied from me (now us), I feel
much better about it. If he provides the records with a new
organization, or presents them in a new style, or uses new
classification codes, that too makes me feel better about the
copying. If his pages contain whole new categories of records that are
not in our pages, that is even better. I.e., in my opinion, copying in
the context of *value-added* is a different ethical situation from
copying without value-added. A current case-in-point is Michael
Naumann, who has copied our HTML source text, but with modifications
and additions auf Deutsch. I wish that he had informed us of his
intent to produce a translation of our work, but I don't feel that his
copying-with-translation was a totally unethical act. If I were him,
with my particular ethical feelings, I would now contact the AstroWeb
consortium and propose to become at least an adjunct member of the
consortium, in order to _officially_ provide a translated edition of
the AstroWeb service.

I hope that the formation of AstroWeb will stop some of this concern
about the ethics of various forms of copying. We are likely to add one
or more new members, some of whom would formerly have been copiers. We
are also likely to attract records for most new announcements of
resources in the future. Because we will have multiple copies, with
geographic diversity, most of the motivations for other people copying
us are likely to disappear. However, even if these things happen, we
must continue to worry about ethical guidelines for ourselves.

-Don

PS-- there is another policy issue that is almost an ethical question:
is it wrong to list _military-related_ resources? The specific case in
our current database is the record for "Backgrounds Data Center BDC".
When I first saw that record I was definitely uneasy. I read the text
closely. I decided that it is probably legitimate astronomy data, and
that I would ignore the political/moral questions that inevitably
arise in such an association. I am still unsure whether we should have
a specific policy statement for cases like this one.