Re: copyright in the digitized object?

On Wed, Mar 01, 2000, Don Roemer <droe2[_at_]earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 29 Feb 2000, Roland J. Cole <cole[_at_]spi.org> wrote:
> >
> > We at SPI do thousands of pages of OCR on public domain documents.
> > We know all the careful and sometimes very creative work that goes
> > into choosing how to OCR, what to OCR, how to represent in text what
> > was a picture, etc. I have no question that you have a copyright in
> > the electronic version as a derivative work.
>
> It is a shame that few courts agree with you. Where is your originality?
> You discuss "sweat of the brow" issues that were dispensed with a long
> time ago. The overruling of "copying a copy" in Alfred Bell sounded
> the death knell for rights in a work that may have cost someone untold
> amount of dollars to [re]produce.

1. I agree that it is a shame that few courts would agree with me. However, I am not sure you and I are talking about the same thing.
2. I agree with Feist (a simple alphabetical phone book), and I oppose much of the thinking behind the "Collections of Data Antipiracy Act" -- simply assembling facts (or simply copying something) should not give the assembler or the copier a copyright in otherwise public domain material.
3. Rather my point was a different one, albeit a point that you may still disagree with. My point is that, at today's state of the art, going from a paper document to a fully-corrected, properly formatted web site with links, headings, etc. requires enough creativity to meet what I think either is or should be well beyond the minimum creativity required for copyright. In my own case, we make thousands of judgments about what to correct, what to omit, etc. that should fully qualify for "selection, arrangement, and display" protection without any claim to the words thereby selected, arranged, and displayed.

Yes, there are programs that purport to "automatically" turn a paper document into a web site. Some of them do come close, although all I have used require at least some tweaking. There are programs that turn a paper document into a word processing document (usually Microsoft Word). Some of those do work with little or no tweaking on some documents.

Thus, I would be tempted to ask for some more analysis beyond "digitizing/OCR is or is not mere copying." In my experience, it sometimes is almost or entirely pure copying, with or without pure hand-correction but many more times than not, producing a finished product requires a number of activities that I think should (and I hope/predict in some case would) receive copyright protection.

Roland J. Cole, Executive Director
Software Patent Institute
9225 Indian Creek Parkway, Suite 1100
OVERLAND PARK KS 66210-2009
913-451-3355; fax 913-451-3361
cole@spi.org; http://www.spi.org/ Received on Thu Mar 02 2000 - 04:21:39 GMT