Re: Attribution is not required in public domain materials

On Thu, 12 Jun 2003, Robert F. Bodi <lawlists[_at_]bodi.com> wrote:
>
> I fail to see how a requirement to attribute a work to its author violates
> anybody's free speech, any more than the requirement that one identify
> oneself to a police officer does. You take the right of free speech too far
> if you give others the right to plagerize. And note that plagiarism does
> NOT require an existing copyright. One can plagerize from the public
> domain.

You are wandering into a totally different territory when you try to make an analogy between requirement of attribution and requirement to reveal one's name to a police officer. We have laws on libel, slander, forgery, and perjury. None of them has any affect on the freedoms of speech and press because they are very limited in term of scope and time and focus on the consequences of the deceitful actions, not the deceitful actions itself.

Later in your post, you said that ideas are not protected and therefore, they do not require attribution. But, plagiarism is not limited to fixed copyrightable expressions but also extend to all ideas. In a way, the free speech allows one to plagiarize by copying ides from other sources without attribution.

> If they take a substantial amount of the text, then YES. Copyright has
> nothing at all to do with it. The issue is that one should recognize the
> sources of one's ideas when those sources are known. That not only is fair
> and ethical, but it BROADENS the practice of free speech because it allows
> others to investigate further. The advancement of knowledge is not
> furthered by hiding the sources of one's works. Quite the opposite is true.
> By listing sources, one helps others check and improve one's works.

You are mixing ethics with legality. Is copyright infringement the same as stealing?

> The issue isn't necessarily one of lawsuits. The concept does not need to
> be legally enforced, but it should be ethically enforced. For example,
> historians that have "borrowed" from others without attribution and
> subsequently have been outed aren't necessarily sued, but their works become
> suspect, as well they should. Thus, there is peer pressure to attribute the
> works of others. Self-policing can work. The problem is that you appear to
> be saying that it is PROPER to not attribute. That I cannot agree with. A
> student who turns in a paper copied from a Shakespeare play should get a
> failing grade if proper attribution is not given. That is the proper
> response.

Again, you are mixing ethics with legality. Note that I said in other post that attribution is nice but it should be always optional, meaning that not providing attribution should not be made illegal.

> "Ideas" are not protected. I serously doubt that she copied, verbatin or
> even closely, the works of an identifiable other person. Hence, no
> attribution is necessary. You are distorting the issue of when attribution
> is needed.

The following are also not protected:

1. Unfixed expressions.
2. Fixed uncopyrightable expressions.
3. Fixed copyrightable expressions that cannot be copyrighted due to Merger Doctrine.
4. Fixed copyrightable expressions whose copyrights have expired.

By your logic, if I copy any from category #4, I do not need to provide attribution because they are not protected. This contradicts your previous statement saying that copying a large portion of a public domain material must have a proper attribution.

> > We must not let authors gain perpetual copyright through the
> > guise of trademark.
>
> Nobody suggested this be done.

Your post seems to say otherwise.

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<riolo[_at_]voicenet.com>
http://www.boycottcopyright.com

Number of days left until 1-1-2019 when all knowledge of 1923 in the land of the U.S.A. will be freed from their copyright owners' prisons: 5,681

Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this post in the public domain. Received on Fri Jun 13 2003 - 19:43:33 GMT