COPYRIGHT CONFUSION IN THE SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE: Mark Goodacre notes that the 2004 SBL Seminar Papers are now online at the SBL web page. He also notes the following paragraph introducing the papers:

2004 Seminar Papers
The SBL Seminar Papers are made available in advance of the Annual Meeting each year. The goal of this pre-publication is to stimulate discussion of these works in progress during the meeting itself. In keeping with this goal, papers published in the Seminar Papers will be summarized, and not read at the meeting. Because these papers represent works in progress, they should not be quoted or otherwise cited without permission from the author.

Italics in the original. I'm frequently surprised when people think they can make up their own copyright laws. I am doubly so when the Society of Biblical Literature, which should know better, tries to do it. For the record, under the rule of "fair use", anyone can quote from a copyrighted work "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research." The details are nebulous and I'm not a a lawyer, but it's safe to say that it's just not on to issue an order that your copyrighted work published on the Internet is not to "be quoted or otherwise cited" without your permission. If people want to interact with the paper, they are well within their rights to cite it or quote it in order to respond to it. They can publish the citation or quotation with the response on the Internet or elsewhere, including in a book or journal. What it comes down to is that if you don't want any public response to your paper, don't publish it, including on the Internet.

For some guidelines on fair use, see Copyright and Fair Use in the Classroom, on the Internet, and the World Wide Web, published on the web page of the Library of the University of Maryland University College. And here is a view by UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh on fisking and fair use.

Excuse me for belaboring this point, but I think it's important. If copyright really worked the way the writer of that paragraph quoted above seems to think it does, the Blogosphere couldn't enjoy the vigorous interchange of ideas which characterizes it.