Copyright Information


General Copyright Information

      UtahGeology.com is a non-profit site designed and targeted for educational use only. Many thanks to the authors and other individuals who have graciously contributed or allowed the use of material on this site. We have tried wherever possible to provide links to original source data or to provide purchase information, encouraging financial support of the original authors.

      Although, for the most part, we have attempted not to use other peoples' work without proper permission, there is a small amount of ill-permissioned copyrighted work on this site. If you find that we have inadvertantly or intentionally used your copyrighted material without your permission, please contact us immediately so that a permission agreement can be made, or so the material can be removed as soon as possible.



Utah Geology Pictures and Images

      For the most part, the images found on UtahGeology.com are the sole work and property of the site owner. Where this is the case, permission is given to freely use any image for personal or educational use. There are a small percentage of images (especially in the 'formation gallery' section) which were acquired from various sources before the primary site developer acquired an awareness and sensitivity to copyright rules and regulations. Most of these early images were acquired from national park and other 'public domain' web resources. A select few, however, were acquired from various personal and educational web-sites...and heck if we can remember exactly which ones they were. We are currently trying our best to phase out all imagery of questionable origin, but as mentioned above, if you happen upon any copyrighted material for which you have not given permission for us to use, please contact us immediately so that a permission agreement can be made, or so the material can be removed as soon as possible.



Stratigraphic Column Database Copyright Info

      Although the information in the Stratigraphich Column Database has come from various sources, a very large percentage of the raw data has come from the book "A Geology History of Utah" and its sources. Permission to post the columns found in this book onto this website was sought in mid 2005. The author understandably and respectfully declined this permission on grounds that the book was about to undergo another printing, and such reproduction might hurt sales of the book and thus was not in the authors best interest.

      As a result of this, we abondoned plans to use the columns 'as are' and began to create our own columns. As a starting point to creating our stratigraphic columns we began to go through many of the sources which the author of "A Geology History of Utah" used to compile his stratigraphic columns. With this endeavor, we found that the vast majority of the data found in his columns was a merely compilation of information and tables created and gathered by others. The general format of the columns follows a widely used standard which dates back at least 80 years (see 1927 example).

      This seems to be the case for most of the stratigraphic columns found in popular literature today. Thus we have used the data from many authors but have tried our best to eliminate any parts of these columns which represent "original or creative work." We have no desire or intention of breaking or infringing upon copyright laws and thus ask any author who feels that their copyrights have been violated to contact us so that corrective action can take place. However, we ask that authors read the following in order to understand to what extent a stratigraphic column may be copyrightable.


U.S. Copyright Law for Data


      This is an extract of the copyright law, concerning tabular data, from the Library of Congress's United States Copyright Office (full version also available in .pdf format). It explains that copyright protection is available for "originality" not "sweat of the brow" or work done to produce something. Concerning "unadorned facts", regardless of the time it took to create the work, it is the "originalily" of the organization/display of that work which is copyrightable. This is illustrated in the supreme court ruling shown in the example below where the court ruled that the data in a phone book was not copyrightable, even though considerable time and effort went into creating it. It was decided that neither the information nor the format in which it was presented was copyrightable because it contained "unadorned facts" displayed according to an accepted standard.

EXTENT OF COPYRIGHT PROTECTION

"Copyright protection extends to the compilation of facts if the compilation represents original authorship. In some instances some or all of the contents of a database, new or revised, may also be copyrightable, as in the case of a full- text bibliographic database. Copyright protection is not available for:
  • ideas, methods, systems, concepts, and layouts
  • individual words and short phrases, individual unadorned facts; and
  • the selection and ordering of data in a database where the collection and arrangement of the material is a mechanical task only, and represents no original authorship; e.g., merely transferring data from hard copy to computer storage
Example
Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991) Rural Telephone Service Company and Feist Publications, Inc., are both publishers of telephone directories. When Rural refused to license its white pages listings to Feist for a directory covering 11 different telephone service areas, Feist extracted the listings it needed from Rural's directory without Rural's consent. Although Feist altered many of Rural's listings, several were identical to listings in Rural's white pages. The District Court granted summary judgment to Rural in its copyright infringement suit, holding that telephone directories are copyrightable. The Court of Appeals affirmed. The Supreme Court reversed the judgment of the Court of Appeals holding that Rural's white pages did not meet the constitutional or statutory requirements for copyright protection, stating that, originality, not "sweat of the brow," is the touchstone of copyright protection in directories and other fact-based works. Raw data are uncopyrightable facts, and the way in which Rural selected, coordinated, and arranged those facts was not original in any way. Copyright rewards originality, not effort."

      We feel that the raw data found in stratigraphic columns fits into the catagory described by this supreme court ruling. We have tried to remove from our stratigraphic columns any aspect of the source data which constituted "original research or presentation" or that which can not be considered an "unadorned fact". As an additional effort to avoid possible copyright infringement of any presentational originality, we have placed our data in a MySQL database and used a php script to create the columns dynamically. The data as it is within the database looks like this and then is created by the server with the following php code when the user requests the page. 


<?

// IF THERES A PERIOD, DISPLAY IT WITH THE APPROPRIATE ROW SPAN
	if ($row['Period'] != 'NULL')
	echo     "<td width='64' rowspan=" . $row['pRow_Span'] . "><p align='center'>"
 	. $row['Period'] . "</p></td>\n";
	
// IF THERES A GROUP, DISPLAY IT 60 WIDE, WITH THE APPROP ROW SPAN.
	if ($row['Groups'] != 'NULL') {   /* ?ADD A AND FM HERE? */
	echo     "<td width='60' rowspan=" . $row['gRow_Span'] . "><p align='center'>"
 	. $row['Groups'] . "</p></td>\n";
	}
// IF THE FORMATIONS ARE UNDER A GROUP, DISPLAY THEM 60 WIDE.
	if ($row['gRow_Span'] >= '1' && $row['gRow_Span'] != 'NULL')
	echo     "<td width='120' colspan='1'><p align='center'> " . $row['Formation']
	 . " </p></td>\n";
	
// IF THERE'S NO GROUPS OR MEMBERS, DISPLAY THE FORMATION FULL SPAN
	if ($row['fRow_Span'] == '1' && $row['gRow_Span'] == 'NULL' && $row['Members'] 
	echo     "<td width='180' colspan='2'><p align='center'> " . $row['Formation']
 	. " </p></td>\n";
	}
// IF THE FORMATION HAS MEMBERS UNDER IT, DISPLAY THE FORMATION 60 WIDE
	if ($row['Formation'] != 'NULL' && $row['Members'] != 'NULL')
	echo      "<td width='60' rowspan=" . $row['fRow_Span'] . "><p align='center'>"
 	. $row['Formation'] . " </p></td>\n";
	
// IF THERE'S A MEMBER, DISPLAY IT.
	if ($row['Members'] != 'NULL')
	echo "<td width='120'><p align='center'> " . $row['Members'] . " </p></td>\n";

?>


      In addition to not wanting to break copyright laws, we also do not want to take away deserved revenue from those who have published works with stratigraphic columns containing data we use. To prevent such, we have added conspicuous links near source data to a book purchase page, which we believe will actually help to advertise and promote sales of the sources we borrow from (especially where we recieve considerable internet traffic from international and non-local sources - who may have no other means of learning of the existence of these source books). As yet an additional courtesy we have disabled the ability of browsers to copy or print off stratigraphic columns from our website. Although this goes against our values of providing free and readily available educational material for this subject which we love so much, we felt it would be a considerate thing to do.