Re: Copyrights as Property (Was: Copyright Extension Bill Passes Congress)

Mike Bradley <mike[_at_]sphinx.com> wrote:
>
> What I put out into the world isn't the work. They are copies of the
> work. The work is still here in my head. Even a painting is a work
> in the painter's head, of which s/he makes only one copy (to confuse
> things, the one copy is called an original!).

I find this analysis somewhat artificial. There is a continuum from the Mozart's of this world who conceive every part of a work in every detail before putting pen to paper (or brush to canvass), to the Jackson Pollock's for whom (in some cases anyway) the work often does not take shape even as an idea until it is actually reduced to material form. I.e. the fixing of the work is (part of) the creation process and it is not until the artist or author interacts with the medium that the idea takes shape.

These two extremes are pretty rare. The vast majority of us lie somewhere in the middle. We have some idea of what we want a work to be before we start, but it gets refined in the process of fixation, regardless of whether it is a letter to mom, a first novel, or a priceless painting (unfortunately I don't create too many of those :-(). That is one of the reasons why the law does not recognize a work until it has been chrystalized into a concrete representation of the ideas it encapsulates.

I argue that most works do have an original from which copies are made. The original is simply the first reduction to material form. The existence of an original is what makes something a work, and provides to the owner a bundle of rights which allows her to control the making of copies even after the original is sold, given away, or even lost or destroyed. A work is simply that bundle of rights that the law protects, just like a fee simple is a bundle of rights in land that the law protects (different rights but same concept).

-- 
| Tim Arnold-Moore, Ph.D., LL.B., B.Sc. (Hons)
| Postal address:  Multimedia Database Systems, RMIT
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|	simul iustus et peccator
<tja[_at_]mds.rmit.edu.au>