Comment Sometimes its not an unwillingness... (Score 3, Interesting) 138
I do research in textual web mining and from time to time I have other researchers ask me for my collections which I spider myself from copyrighted web sources. While my work is purely academic, I am covered by fair use. But since US intellectual property laws are obtuse and overbearing (imho), I cannot take the risk of sharing my collections with others for fear of running afoul of copyright law (since I can't control what is done with the collection once it is out of my hands and how do I know they would use it in a manner consistent with fair use). So it may be more than an unwillingness out of statistical fudging and more an unwillingness to become a target of copyright lawyers.