by E. Garzilli

In the Note from the Editor of the Journal of South Asia Women Studies vol. 1, no. 1 (November 1, 1995) we wrote that the journal was copyrighted, but with automatic permission for the author to publish anywhere else later on, when he/she so wishes.

When my paper on stridhana or women�s property rights was published (International Journal of Tantric Studies vol. 2, no. 1 � January 15, 1996) and we won the "1st Highest Data Quality WWW Resource" from the Australian National University, I was asked to republish my paper in hard copy. Even though the issue was regularly registered at the Copyright Office, and I informed everybody that I had written this paper for a felicitation volume, the paper was copied and reproduced in several versions even abridged, and it was rewritten for an international trading company willing "to know Indian law and customs so that we can sell better" from the email I received in February 1996 from the sales manager of the company).

At this point I decided to publish the journals also in hard copy. We changed the copyright notice at the end of every email issue and on our WWW page. We want to publish first, both on the Internet and hard copy format, unpublished and original materials; we ask authors who want to republish their papers to ask for our written permission; we require them to give bibliographic information on our journals in the first footnote and in the introduction; we give authors free written permission to republish their contributions only when they have agreed to our requests in writing.

Copyright is a problem especially on the Internet and various attempts to establish once and for all the "fair use" of academic material have failed. Nevertheless, this lack of control does not justify the illicit copying and reproduction of writings.

We changed our Copyright Notice three times. Our current Copyright Notice reads:

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying and displaying, without the written permission of the publisher.

Address all inquires to:

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