Re: Copyright in the Dead Sea Scrolls? How?

At 06:14 AM 3/9/96 EST, you wrote:
>
>> There has been a case in Israel... against a professor here in the
>> States who took Dead Sea Scroll material ... recreated ... and then
>> proceeded to publish his reconstruction.
>
> (1) How in the world does an ISRAELI court have jurisdiction over an
> alleged infringement occuring within the United States?
>
> (2) How can the mere ownership of a scroll raise a copyright issue? If
> I find letters in an attic of a place I move to, I own the letters
> but I do not have any right to publish them {or restrict someone else
> who has a copy from doing so} unless either I own the copyright
> because I wrote the letters or I have an assignment of copyright
> from the owner.
>
> (3) How can there be an infringement upon a work where the authors are
> known to be dead for more than 50 years? (I can presume that if these
> are the "Dead Sea Scrolls" that the material is several thousand years
> old.)
>
> This sounds a little farfetched to believe. Otherwise it's shocking if
> true.
>

I think this has been discussed on-list before. I don't know the answer to your jurisdictional question, though the US is perhaps not in the best position to criticize the exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction by other nations.

On the copyright issue, US law provides that unpublished works which were formerly subject to common-law copyright will receive protection until at least 2002, and in the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls probably to 2027, regardless of how old they are. See 17 USC sec. 303. Perhaps Israel has a similar law. [If your argument is that this is a silly law, I happen to agree].

On the issue of copying, the facts above suggest that the professor did more than merely own it -- he "recreated" and then published the work.

Mark Lemley
Assistant Professor, University of Texas School of Law Of Counsel, Fish & Richardson, P.C.
mlemley[_at_]mail.law.utexas.edu Received on Wed Mar 13 1996 - 16:43:48 GMT