Re: Copyright & The New World Economic Order

On Thu, 29 Jul 1999, Colin Seeger <seeger[_at_]ozemail.com.au> wrote:
>
> If you mean copyright in the expression "Thou shall not kill" --
> you'd have a tough job convincing a jury that you had copyright in
> those words. No copyright, no locus = no case. The requirement
> that a "literary work" be more than a few words strung together,
> acts a an automatic brake on any claims. That said, maybe
> "Supercalifragalisticexpialidocious" could claim to quality as
> a literary work,by virtue of sheer length...

But, how do you define "few"? Is it three? Four? Five? Where do we stop at? A metaphysical question: When does copyright start to subsist? Does copyright subsist when I type the letter "B" at the beginning of this paragraph? At the first question mark? At the fourth question mark? It is not always obvious whether a sentence like "Thou shall not kill." is always uncopyrightable.

If people think that this is silly, no, it is not. Take a look at many posters that have few words or short sentences. One of the quotations I like is "What is popular is not always right. What is right is not always popular." (I do not know who wrote the quotation.) Are the few words, short sentences, and short quotations (like the one I just mentioned) as appeared on the posters copyrightable? Likewise for very short poems. I once thought of a project to collect examples of English sentences to illustrate the usages of the English words (similar to _Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English_ where there is one or two examples after most definitions) but have put it in the back of my mind, due to uncertainty about their uncopyrightability. Even the U.S. Copyright Office is no help at all (they use words like "few", "short", etc.).

By the way, the correct spelling is "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" (note the 14th letter is "i", not "a"). <grin>

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<riolo[_at_]voicenet.com> Received on Fri Jul 30 1999 - 00:35:30 GMT