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But that would seem to imply that, for example, the RIAA can't sue someone for downloading half a song (or all but the last 5 seconds).
by bo1024 15y ago
But that would seem to imply that, for example, the RIAA can't sue someone for downloading half a song (or all but the last 5 seconds).
- jerf 15y agoA single song is not a "collective work". If anyone is tempted to start spinning the English meaning of the term "collected" to point out how in some sense a song is often a collection of a lot of other elements that may be further copyrighted, stop. The English meaning is not the relevant one, the legal meaning is. A single song is not, legally, a collected work, it is a single work. If anyone is tempted to construct some exceptional song-like thing that is also a collected work, yes, very good, you've got your thesis topic for your copyright class all laid out, but it is an exception, not the rule.
- Arelius 15y agoCurious, would this case be different if the song was a Mashup? I suspect so, right?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jerf 15y agoA mashup would be a derivative work of several original works, not a collection of works. Also, for the record, that wasn't the question I was trying to forestall with my last paragraph. I was more after someone doing something bizarre like creating a multi-hour "song" where each "instrument" is a full other song loaded as one big sample or something. Generally speaking the answer to this sort of trickery is "You're a programmer, and you're using thought processes designed to slip things past computers. Judges are human." There are certainly ways to "slip things past" a human judge as well, but they are very different. Human judges generally react poorly to outright sophistry, where computers don't mind it one bit.
- delackner 15y agoThis whole thing sounds like the quantum mechanics of copyright since it doesn't fit with common sense. If copying individual elements (all the chapter titles) of a work is fine, how is it that it is unacceptable to make an original song that contains a 5 second sample of a single instrument from another song? Both are copying a very small excerpt from a larger work.
- jerf 15y agoQuantum mechanics is at its most mysterious when you haven't even taken the time to learn the basic terminology. From my point of view, your question is odd because you've made up both parts of the if clause from whole cloth. Copying "individual elements" may or may not be fine, and five second samples are just plain irrelevant to the discussion being had. Again, "collective work" is an important term here. It is not clear to me that you understand what that means, and generally trying to answer questions based on deep misconceptions gets nowhere fast. If you really care you're going to have to go pick up some basics from not-an-HN-comment.
- delackner 15y agoI'm not sure how you got the idea that I was trying to argue about what copyright LAW says. I was simply making the case that, just as with quantum mechanics, nothing about copyright is based on common sense, so people need to be careful to be aware of this bias when they think about these issues, especially when a lot of people discussing this have moral / philosophical positions that confuse their view of the legal standing of the plaintiffs. "That doesn't seem right" is a question of legislation policy, not of interpreting existing law.
- jerf 15y agoNo, it makes more sense than you think. It's not total sense, but it makes more sense than you think. It's just that since you don't seem to know what the terms mean you're getting a greater sense of confusion than is justified, plus technical people just can't resist the lure of trying to create bizarre exceptions which don't help. What constitutes a single work is basically what a person on the street would answer is a single thing. What constitutes a collective work is basically what a person on the street would call a collective work, after they answer the first question. (That is, if you start here they might say an album is one work, but if you get them to agree that a song is one thing once they probably won't say that.) What constitutes copying is basically what a person on the street would agree is copying. That certainly isn't good enough advice to go off of if you're going to try to build a business off of it or something, and edge cases abound, but the core concepts aren't anywhere near as screwed up as you might think. The problem isn't conceptual with copyright, it is how the concepts are used and abused.
- mikeryan 15y agoIts not about pieces of a single copyrighted work its about numerous pieces of separately copyrighted works that can be part of an overarching copyrighted "collective" an anthology of short stories is a good example. Each short story's copyright can remain the copyright of the individual authors, but the anthology as a whole is the copyright of whoever put the anthology together. In this case Java is the collective work, the APIs are the short stories. To the point below assuming a mashup is made by licensing samples from other works (avoiding fair use issues for a second) the Mashup would be a copyrightable work. But the authors of the individual samples still retain their own copyright.
- bo1024 15y agoI see, thank you.