Re: Re: Re: Copyright Ownership of Legal Briefs

At 3:00 PM -0500 2/9/05, Roy Murphy wrote:
>On Tue, 8 Feb 2005 6:22pm, John wrote:
>>There have been no unintended or economically inefficient
>>consequences regarding the copyright protection afforded legal
>>briefs. Common sense trumps Berne.
>
>Do you mean these effects were *intended*? That's enough reason
>right there to repudiate Berne.

No, I meant there have been no effects. No one (I almost inserted "so far as I know" but I'm going to climb out on a limb and say it without qualification) has ever sued anyone for copyright infringement of a brief filed with a court. Recall your point:

At 5:55 PM -0500 2/8/05, Roy Murphy wrote:
>
>It was Berne that got us into this mess. Pre-Berne briefs were PD
>because they were published without notice. No question, no issue.
>This presumptive copyright approach once again proves to have
>unintended and economically inefficient consequences. Apparently
>Berne trumps all common sense.
>

What would be inefficient is requiring a copyright notice when every original work IS presumptively copyrighted, including object code where you couldn't see the copyright notice if there was one, and sculptures which would be defaced by a copyright notice. What would be inefficient is having to determine the country of origin before you could determine whether or not the absence of a copyright notice was legally significant.

>We have cops in Chicago trying to stop people from taking pictures
>of a sculpture in a public park under the theory that any photos are
>necessarially infringing.

The problem here has nothing to do with Berne. The PROFESSIONAL photographer who tried to shoot the sculpture in Millennium Park didn't need a copyright notice (and where would you put it anyway) to know that Kapoor's sculpture is not in the public domain. The problem here is the American law that makes infringement for "commercial advantage" a crime, enacted after that guy LaMacchia (sp?) beat the rap because he was trading unauthorized copies of software instead of selling them.

John Noble Received on Fri Feb 11 2005 - 00:10:00 GMT