Need Help with Programming Science Project

[Roy Smith]

In article <mailman.5959.1390611612.18130.python-list at python.org>,
 Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:

> bob gailer <bgailer at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > On 1/24/2014 5:05 AM, theguy wrote:
> > > I would post the code, but I don't know if it's fine to put it here,
> > > as it contains pieces from books. I do believe that would go against
> > > copyright laws.
> 
> > AFAIK copyright laws apply to reproducing something for profit.
> 
> That's a common misconception that has never been true.
> 
> <URL:http://www.faqs.org/faqs/law/copyright/myths/part1/>
> 
> Copyright is a legal monopoly in a work, reserving a large set of
> actions to the copyright holders. Without license from the copyright
> holders, or an exemption under the law, you cannot legally perform those
> actions.

[The rest of this post is based on my "I am not a lawyer" understanding 
of the law.  Also, this is based on US copyright law; things may be 
different elsewhere, and I haven't the foggiest idea what law applies to 
an international forum such as this]

On the other hand (where Ben Finney's post is the first hand), there is 
the Fair Use Doctrine (FUD), which grants certain exemptions.  The US 
Copyright Office has a page (http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html) 
about this.

As a real-life example, I believe I can safely invoke the FUD to quote 
the leading paragraphs from today's New York Times and New York Post 
articles about the same event and give their Fleish-Kincaid Reading Ease 
and Grade Level scores, if I was comparing the writing style of the two 
newspapers:

----------------------------------------------

NY Times:

The crime gripped the public’s imagination, for both its magnitude and 
its moxie: In the predawn hours of Dec. 11, 1978, a group of masked 
gunmen seized about $6 million in cash and jewels from a cargo building 
at Kennedy International Airport.

Reading Ease Score: 56.6
Grade Level: 10.6

----------------------------------------------

NY Post:

On Dec. 11, 1978, armed mobsters stole $5 million in cash and nearly $1 
million in jewels from a Lufthansa airlines vault at JFK Airport, in 
what would be for decades the biggest-ever heist on US soil.

Reading Ease Score: 76.2
Grade Level: 7.3

----------------------------------------------

The scores above were computed by http://www.readability-score.com/

In my opinion, this meets all of the requirements of the FUD.  I'm 
quoting short passages, and using them to critique the writing styles of 
the two papers.

In the OP's case, he's analyzing published works as input to a text 
analysis algorithm.  In my personal opinion, posting samples of those 
texts, for the purpose of discussing how his algorithm works, would be 
well within the bounds of Fair Use.