2 ms·

Copyfraud Is Stealing the Public Domain

• tedunangst 17y ago
  Overblown. Amazon lets you sell public domain books. Big whoop. The examples seem a little stretched too. I tried reading the original paper, but it's quite dry and 75% footnotes, but one example was a school textbook that reprints the constitution and claims copyright (over the whole work) without explicitly uncopyrighting the public domain bits. That's explicitly allowed. You can copyright arrangements and collections of public domain work, to the extent that there is original work involved in the selection. On the whole, the summary seems to be "some people tried to use public domain work and other people complained but they shouldn't have."
  • ubernostrum 17y ago
    "On the whole, the summary seems to be "some people tried to use public domain work and other people complained but they shouldn't have."" Not quite. The Google book search stuff, for example, is problematic: digitizing a public-domain book, or printing a new copy and slapping a binding on it, generally isn't sufficient to grant you a copyright in the resulting work, since there is no original work involved in doing so. As a result, publishers who claim copyright in public domain works after having done nothing other than digitize or otherwise republish are making false claims regarding the copyright status of those works. I'd personally be interested to know whether the heirs of the original rightsholder could -- even after copyright expires -- bring a suit for slander of title over this sort of behavior.
• yangyang 17y ago
  Argh, too many levels of indirection. The paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=787244#PaperDownload http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=787244#Pa... Article on The Register, referenced by the Slashdot post: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/26/copyfraud/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/26/copyfraud/