Re: Archiving old magazines on website

[Lee Hart <leeahart@earthlink.net>]

>> I suggest GIF. It's an old format, and I know there are readers
>> for the CoCo 3 and C=64/128, probably also Apple.

Most magazine articles are just text. So, I would suggest that plain
text is the most appropriate way to handle it. It will download far
faster, take far less storage, and can be read by the widest range of
machines. When articles contain programs, it will be far easier to
extract and run them if they are ASCII text, rather than some image
format.

When there is a relevant illustration, then they should be provided in
an appropriate image format (like GIF for schematics, or JPEG for
photos, etc.)

I did some work to put Tom Pittman's early Tiny BASIC books and articles
on-line for him. We put the text in HTML format, so it could be
presented with approximately the same page layout as the original, yet
still easy to view with a web browser or to save as ASCII text so you
could run the programs. HTML made it easy to connect it to the
illustrations. The hypertext links also allowed for fast jumps to the
index, table of contents, etc. It worked out rather well.

On copyrights: A lot depends on the situation. I've written many
articles, and generally don't mind if someone reprints them. It's polite
if they ask first; when they do I almost always give permission. When I
find one that's been posted without permission and without crediting me
as the author, I ask them to take it off. So far, in all cases they do,
or we come to some agreement.

So, I would suggest that you try to contact the author and get
permission. If that fails, print it but credit him for the work. If he
contacts you, do as he wishes (its his material, after all). And in any
case, don't try to sell material that you know you don't own and don't
have permission to distribute -- THAT is what will get you into deep
trouble!

I've only had one case where someone stole my work without permission
and sought to make money from it. It eventually came to lawyers, and I
threatened to sue. Their lawyers advised their client that they would
certainly lose, and we settled out of court for $10,000. It was an
expensive lesson for them, I'm sure.
-- 
"Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the
world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has!" -- Margaret Meade
--
Lee A. Hart  814 8th Ave N  Sartell MN 56377  leeahart_at_earthlink.net