A thread at Search Engine Watch Forums touches on an interesting topic, for me at least, on the ethics and legalities of selling ones notes of a conference. Most of the readers here know that this site has been a source of extremly detailed Search Engine Marketing Conferences, we have covered several conference comprehensively.
There is an individual (http://whatsnextonline.com/search_strategies/) that is publishing and selling their coverage of Search Engine Strategies New York 2005 conference. In the thread Ian, who happens to have some legal background, discusses this topic (which I bet will turn into an interesting thread). He asks the following questions:
Any thoughts? While you are thinking about this, what (if any) difference would there be between this and (for example) news reporting like Rusty, news reporting for a paid subscription site (like a newspaper) or other types of reporting or condensed news such as forums like SEW or High Rankings, blog sites like threadwatch, and so forth? Is there a difference? Is this a wrong thing to do? Is there any harm done? Does it even matter? I'm also interested in what other speakers think of this, as well as the opinions of SES attendees who paid their money, and people who did not go. Useful report or copyright infringment? At what point does one become the other?
My main thought is "I would not feel comfortable charging a fee for my reports simply because they are unedited and probably are very hard to read. So they are unprofessional and thus "priceless."" But the thread has some nice responses so far, its a must read for conference report attendees, readers, and fans.
