RE: Economics of Dead Tree

From: Karen Coyle <kec[_at_]stubbs.ucop.edu>
Date: Fri, 26 Apr 96 17:14:11 PDT

On Wed, 24 Apr 96 18:18:34 GMT Tim Perrin wrote:

>

> Yes, but over many generations, language changes until the book, even
> though physically there, is no longer readable. Try Chaucer in the
> original "English". So, how is this problem any different.

It's different because though language may have changed, the human eyeball is essentially the same. The characters on the page can be seen by anyone who picks up the book.

With digital documents, there is no seeing if the hardware and software to translate the document to a human-readable form isn't available. In this case, "translation" doesn't refer to translating the language, but translating the unreadable digital form. I prefer to call that "converting."

> Then, do they get the copyright in the "translation" of the programming
> code? What if it is done by an automated translator?

There are a lot of issues that come up with you consider converting documents from one machine-readable form to another. While it is commonly said that computers can make exact copies of originals, converted files often cannot be guaranteed to produce identical output. For example, audio file compression is designed to lose some information in the interest of efficiency. This information may have a neglible effect on the sound quality, but what results is not an exact copy of the original, pre-compressed file. A document that was produced in an early version of WordPerfect can be converted to Word 6.0, but the conversion will undoubtedly introduce differences.

At what point has a different file been produced as it is converted through various generations of software?

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Karen Coyle <kec[_at_]stubbs.ucop.edu>
University of California - Library Automation http://www.dla.ucop.edu/~kec Received on Sat Apr 27 1996 - 00:11:32 GMT