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

On 20, July 1998, Joseph P. Riolo <riolo[_at_]voicenet.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

Could you please respond to my original formulation of the problem of the Oxford University Press owning the copyright on Wells 1985 edition of Shakespeare's works, one which I affirm but others would deny. I thought your reformulation left out important details of my original question, which was that it would take an architect (not a repairman) to reconstruct an ancient structure that existed only in thousands of fragments, many missing or damaged. I claim similar work in the field of Shakespeare would constitute something deserving copyright protection, because it goes beyond mere "repair" or emendation.

Michael A Scarpitti
Assistant Editor
Materials Evaluation
1711 Arlingate Lane
PO Box 28518
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<mscarpit[_at_]asnt.org> Received on Tue Jul 21 1998 - 16:36:25 GMT