Re: Life under stupid Database legislation

Brooks Constantine:

I am not a lawyer, nothing in this note is legal advice, the following remarks are merely my private opinion (though I think they are CORRECT opinions.)

H.R. 2652 would take many works out of the public domain in effect
(though not in theory) by making it an infringement to copy public
domain material from any secondary source that could be represented as a compilation. A book of selected sonnets of Shakespeare is now protected in its selection (if any most books will print them all) and arrangement
(though most books will print them in canonical order). A competing
selection couldn't copy the first unchanged, if it had original selection and arrangement. But any individual sonnet may be copied under current law as I understand it, and more than one may if the copying doesn't infringe on the first book's selection and organization. H.R. 2652 appears to make it an infringement to copy even ONE sonnet from ANY edition of Shakespeare which was published in the last 75 years. A similar argument might also apply to the Bible. Since the Bible is a compilation of many books, H.R. 2652 might make it infringement to copy from even a King James Bible (which is in the public domain in the U.S. though I think it may be under Crown copyright in the U.K) in which the ink is less than 75 years old.

Timothy Phillips
<hrothgar[_at_]telepath.com>

P.S. Oops! Sorry, guys, I didn't read the bill quite closely enought. #1205(c) states that "This chapter does not provide any greater protection to a work of authorship contained in a collection of information, other than a work that is itself a collection of information, than is available to that work under any other chapter of this title." As I read H.R. 2652, this means we will still be allowed to quote MOST of the King James Bible, but the census of the states of Israel in the book of Numbers will have to be verified independently, as will any of the genealogical passages. Likewise we can still quote from public domain translations of Homer, except perhaps from the catalog of ships. What else? As I read, it will be illegal to copy tables of guitar chords or wind-instrument fingerings. Everyone must work out how to finger guitar chords for himself before publishing any book containing guitar chords with fingering diagrams. Everyone must compute his own logarithms from scratch. Fortunately we have computers now so that won't be too hard. What else? It will be illegal to publish more than a small list of the titles in the New York Public Library, unless you go to New York and read the titles off the shelves. Verifying the titles on-line won't do, since in that case one is copying from the library's on-line catalog. Received on Fri Jun 12 1998 - 21:02:01 GMT