Re: thought for the week

On Sat, 31 Jul 1999, Terry Carroll <carroll[_at_]tjc.com> wrote:
>
> On 29 Jul 1999, Seth P. Johnson <seth.johnson[_at_]realmeasures.dyndns.org> wrote:
> >
> > "Copyright" is a misnomer. What's important is authorial rights.
>
> It's only a misnomer if you misunderstand it to mean "the right to
> copy," with copy as a verb. The actual origin of the term refers to
> the right to the copy, with "copy" as a noun, and used in the sense
> of the content of the work (a sense that survives in terms like a
> newspaper's "copy desk" or "copy editor").

Can you cite any authority for that claim? All the dictionaries I have looked at define copyright the noun as ``the exclusive right to reproduce, publish, and sell the work'' or words to that effect. It thus is the right to do something, like copying, the work, not the right to a copy of the work, and, more importantly, the copyright includes the right to exclude others from making or selling the work.

Under the current U.S. Copyright Act, by the way, a ``copy'' is a tangible medium of expression -- e.g., a floppy disk or a magnetic tape -- in which the copyrighted work is embodied.

--
Peter D. Junger--Case Western Reserve University Law School--Cleveland, OH
 EMAIL: junger@samsara.law.cwru.edu    URL:  http://samsara.law.cwru.edu/
        NOTE: junger[_at_]pdj2-ra.f-remote.cwru.edu no longer exists