Re: New editions of publ

Dan Agin writes:
>
> Jamie Wodetzki writes about Australian copyright law providing
> copyright in "published editions" -- fonts, layouts, etc. of public
> domain text.
>
> It could be argued that such laws are now totally obsolete. It requires
> less than 15 hours to scan and proof a 300 page book, thereby converting
> the text into plain ASCII, which can then be used by the second publisher
> to quickly produce a Postscript file with new fonts, layouts, etc., for
> tranmittal to a printer. The second publisher does not need the first
> publisher's fonts, layout, etc., since new utilitarian features are
> easily substituted. The "published editions" provisions are therefore
> protecting something no one needs to copy in the first place. Ten years
> ago such laws made some limited sense a priori; now such laws are empty.

I agree that the category looks redundant and ineffective with modern technology, but there may be a catch.

There is some doubt as to how permanent a work (or a reproduction) has to be before it attracts protection (or is a breach) in Australia. If the courts lean towards protecting more transitory works, then the digital image of each page produced in the process of scanning the paper edition is (arguably?) a copy of that page and could be held to be an infringement (published edition copyright protects against `copies' not `reproductions' although I am unaware of any judicial distinction of the terms).

Infringement would be more difficult to prove as you would need external evidence of the process by which a resulting publication was produced as the publication itself might not contain any evidence that it resulted from scanning a protected edition. The CLRC report to which Jamie referred is not very clear on this issue but suggested some changes in wording which might strengthen this conjecture.

Tim Arnold-Moore, LL.B. (Melb)      | Multimedia Database Systems, CITRI  |
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