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Politech is the oldest Internet resource devoted to politics and technology. Launched in 1994 by Declan McCullagh, the mailing list has chronicled the growing intersection of culture, technology, politics, and law. Since 2000, so has the Politech web site.
Previous Politech message: "Scientific American assails prof who attacked enviro-article" http://www.politechbot.com/p-03226.html --- Date: Fri, 08 Mar 2002 10:53:22 +1100 From: Bernard Palmer <bwp@primaryfundamentalright.org> To: declan@wired.com Subject: [Fwd: from Scientific American] Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="------------070309060609050407090504" This is the reply I received from John Rennie, editor of Scientific American to my email suggesting he should apologize for the Lomborg fiasco. Bernard Palmer -------- Original Message -------- Subject: from Scientific American Date: 07 Mar 2002 12:44:19 -0500 From: "John Rennie" <mailto:jrennie@sciam.com><jrennie@sciam.com> Reply-To: John Rennie <mailto:jrennie@sciam.com><jrennie@sciam.com> To: <mailto:bwp@primaryfundamentalright.org><bwp@primaryfundamentalright.org> It's unfortunate that a number of people who are fans of The Skeptical Environmentalist are spreading a misleading picture of Scientific American's dealings with him, to the effect that Scientific American has tried to stifle his response to our article. This is completely untrue. I spoke with Lomborg by phone before the publication of our article and assured him that we were very interested in receiving his response to our authors' criticisms. Recently we received a reply for print from him, which arrives just in time for our May issue, which is when it is scheduled to appear. When Lomborg first posted his reply on his web site, he posted the entire text of our article. This is an infringement of our copyright and interferes with our business of selling the article (which is, after all, how magazines stay in business). We make this request routinely to _anyone_ who republishes Scientific American articles without our permission. We told Lomborg that he could still pu blish short quotations from it to ground his argument, however. His response was to post a slightly edited version of our article that still included 3/4 of the original text, which we saw as an act of bad faith. At that point we told him that he should remove all our text. Note that we never complained about what he said or tried to restrict him from saying whatever he wanted; all we did was inhibit his unauthorized republication of our text. We have no objection to Lomborg saying or writing whatever he likes, however much we disagree with it. All we ask is that he respect our legal rights. No one needs to reprint an entire text to criticize it; like any book reviewers, our authors criticized Lomborg's book without quoting more than a few sentences from it. Lomborg can certainly do the same. What Lomborg's web site does not acknowledge, moreover, is that when we first pointed out the copyright infringement to him, we volunteered to put his entire response onto our w eb site, thus eliminating the copyright infringement problem. This posting will occur concurrently with our May issue. Scientific American has no interest in trying to stifle debate on this subject and has done nothing toward that end. We are disappointed that Lomborg or some of his supporters might have anyone think otherwise. -- John Rennie, editor in chief Scientific American 415 Madison Ave. New York, NY 10017 tel: 212-451-8813 fax: 212-755-1976 <mailto:jrennie@sciam.com>jrennie@sciam.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------