I must have missed the announcement, and I admit it had been a while since I last visited the main page of the Arellano Law Foundation's LawPhil Project. But this afternoon, while researching for information about drug education in the Philippines, I happened to go to LawPhil.net and saw this:
Take a look at that Creative Commons logo. They are releasing the entire database ("This work") under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Philippines License. This means that anybody wishing to create a free version of Lex Libris from CD Asia and PHIL JURIS from Gigabytes Research Systems, Inc. can now make use of their database!
But not so fast though. They have not clearly defined anywhere what they mean by "This work", and their copyright page is still under construction. Also, all of their HTML still contains this notice:
<!-- COPYRIGHT NOTICE
Copyrightc2000 Arellano Law Foundation ITC Web Development Team. All Rights Reserved.
Obtain permission before copying codes here.
Web Design and Programming by the ALF-ITC Web Development Team.
The LawPhil Project - Arellano Law Foundation.
Copyrightc2002. All Rights Reserved. -->
hey.. What does that mean? I'm confused. I am spending quite a lot with photocopied scras due to the unavailability of lawphil.net. please email me about it.. esie_32@yahoo.com
Hi Sarita!
First of all, I am not a lawyer, and will not be one for the next ten years or so. I am just a nobody who just really like law.
Now, I don't know about the copyright status of SCRA. Most probably, it is copyrighted by some private individual, or at least not the government. If I understood you correctly, you mean that the SCRA is not found on LawPhil.net - which makes sense, if it [SCRA] is indeed copyrighted.
What I was trying to point out is that the people behind LawPhil.net is releasing its contents under a Creative Commons license. This would mean then that anyone can reuse this material subject to the CC license. But as I've pointed out, this is not clear yet, since there is nothing on their site defining what is meant by "this content".
Anyway, I'm writing an email to them right now and hopefully I can get something within this week.