Re: Attribution

On Fri, 27 Jun 2003, Katharine Colgan <katecolgan[_at_]comcast.net> wrote:
>
> Of course, they do. It's their income. It pays their bills. It's what they
> have to leave to their children. Are you suggesting artists don't have the
> right to live like normal people because their contributions to
> society--making ideas into tangible creations--are so great? Their
> contributions must be great or it would be pointless to say that everyone
> should be able to claim them as their own. If they were worthless, no one
> would care.

I am disagreeing with your assertion that corporation alone is responsible for the threat to the freedom and accessibility of knowledge (number 4 in your message dated June 22, 2003). My position is that authors and artists also share the same responsibility.

_New York Times Co. v. Tasini_ is an example. The authors have the limited powers as granted by copyright to control accessibility to their works. But, they don't stop there. They want to have more power through term extension, DCMA, and DRM. To say that copyright is not the culprit does not mesh with the reality.

> I'm a lawyer and a scholar. ...

Sorry to be very blunt. You need to get off your high horse and try to see through the eyes of the common people and the eyes of the public domain.

> .... I provide attribution all the time. ...

We already had a disagreement on how much attribution is needed. Your assertion rests largely on how you define attribution and how much attribution you think is required.

> .... It's not
> hard. Where are you getting the notion that a 100 page report needs 300
> attributions? But supposing it does. If it's too hard, then don't write it.

Here is what the Supreme Court said in _Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp._:

          Reading "origin" in [Sect.]43(a) to require
     attribution of uncopyrighted materials would pose
     serious practical problems.  Without a copyrighted
     work as the basepoint, the word "origin" has no
     discernable limits.

Some people don't have the time and resources to list all attributions. Also, not everyone agrees on how much attribution is required. Furthermore, some people have pragmatic reasons for not listing all or some attributions such as limitation of space, absurdity in attributions, or fear of lawsuit.

> Apart from the fairness, honor, and decency issues, work without
> attributions is less authoritative.

To paraphrase a saying, don't judge a book by the number of footnotes it has. Just because a book is full of footnotes does not automatically make it more authoritative. Also, just because a book lacks footnotes does not make it less authoritative. The U.S. Constitution is void of attribution and yet is the most authoritative document in the land of U.S.

You overlook the variety of rules across different groups of people. News reporters have their own rules for attribution. Judges have their own rules for attribution. So do researches, movie directors, novelists, poets, historians, painters, photographers, programmers, designers, and so on.

How is this possible? Thanks to the freedom of speech.

When you force your standard of attribution through legal means on other groups of people, you are depriving them of the freedom to express. This should be avoided at all costs.

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: 5,664

Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this post in the public domain. Received on Mon Jun 30 2003 - 22:37:38 GMT