Copyright in Arrangement (Was: Re: Academics and coursepacks)

I am continuing this thread a bit more. Instead of including the posts, I am referring to the replies made by Dan L. Burk <BURKDANL[_at_]shu.edu>, Prof. Jay Dougherty <FJDoughe[_at_]lmulaw.lmu.edu>, Peter Groves
<PeterGroves[_at_]compuserve.com>, and Tim Phillips <hrothgar[_at_]telepath.com>.

Let's say that person C comes and sees these four pieces (A, B, C, and D). After studying the pieces, he declares that persons A and B are dead wrong and the order must be B, A, D, and C.

Five years later, person D comes and sees the same pieces. He thinks that persons A, B, and C are really off the mark. He decides that the real order is D, C, A, and B.

Can any of these three different orders (BCAD, BADC, and DCAB) be copyrighted? I think so because the original work does not exist and there is no way to find out which of the orders is the "right" one.

To continue one more time, twenty years later, person E discovers an old book in a coffin that is buried about 5 miles away from the old cave. The old book shows that person C's order is the right one. How will it affect the copyright status of persons A's, B's, and C's orders?

Although I based my fictional scenario on the Dead Sea Scrolls (as mentioned by Dan L. Burk), I have seen a similar situation in case of Confucius' works where very few scholars are trying to find the original works as done by Confucius himself. Likewise for the Bible where scholars tried to rearrange some verses in a chapter. However, they are not very possessive about their arrangements of the pieces in Confucius' works and Bible, unlike the scholars who work on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<riolo[_at_]voicenet.com>
Received on Tue Jul 21 1998 - 00:20:17 GMT