copyright notice

[Donald Eastlake]

In article <> jimb at amdcad.UUCP (Jim Budler) writes:
>In article <5600 at cca.UUCP> dee at cca.UUCP (Donald Eastlake) writes:
>>
>>Sounds like nonsense to me.  If something is in the public domain, I
>>can do more or less anything with it, including making copies of it
>>with my copyright notice.
>
>Now that's nonsense.  The copyright law, like the patent law does not
>allow one to copyright or patent anything in the public domain.

Patent law is radically more stringent than copyright law.  Lets limit
ourselves to copyright.

>The fact that
>you can physically insert your notice into something reflects the
>portion of the copyright law which allows you to copyright your
>changes to a public domain object.

I didn't say anything about inserting my notice into a public domain
object.  I said I could make a copy of the public domain object and
add my copyright notice to said copy.

>Thus assuming you have obtained a public domain object such as source code
>of a utility, and you are able to modify this and redistribute your
>modified source with your copyright notice in it.
>
>Now I come along and receive your distributed source. I am able to determine
>your modifications (perhaps I've always had a printed listing, but didn't
>want to type a lot) and remove them. I may then make my own modifications
>to the source code and redistribute it. And you can do nothing about it.

Even if you can provably exactly recover the original public domain
"thing", which is more or less possible if the object is a simple bit
pattern, and remove all modifications I have made, I would still, in
general, have just grounds to object and could sue you.  For example,
what if I had gone to a lot of work to find and piece together the best
working versions of a group of related public domain modules and also
made some minor mods to one of them.  Clearly I could copyright this
assemblage.  (I could do so even if there were no mods although if I was
at all clever I would make some subtle ones (like maybe changing <tab>
to <space><tab> where it would not matter) so I could nail you in
court).  Do you think that the copyright notices in books of quoatations
are invalid because these books are assemblages of public domain
utterances?

But, you object, what about single works that are not compilations?
Well, why do publishers normally put current copyright notices into
photographic reprints of old books whose copyrights have expired?  Don't
they deserve some reward for locating a copy in resonably good condition
and reprinting it?  How can you tell if they just grabbed a copy from
the local library or had to painstakingly piece together the good pages
from the only five copies left in the world, each partly damanged.  Yet
this is all public domain stuff.

Another example, lets look at photography and art.  Photographers and
artists have copyright in their works regardless of how closely they
resemble some common real world "public domain" scene.  Although
theoretically based on their creativity, in reality its more like they
have copyright because they claim it.

Looking at these and other examples, the only conclusion I can come to
is that, under modern copyright law, the amount of "originality" or
"work" investment required to support a valid copyright claim is so
small that if I took public domain software, added a copyright notice TO
THE COPIES I DISTRIBUTED the law would uphold my right to restrict
further copying of those particular copies in return for my work of
distribution and my "creativity" in picking that particular material to
distribute.  [PS:  I have not done this, don't plan to, and would not
expect it to be popular if I tried.]

>An object, once in public domain, is always in public domain.

Even if the above sentence is true, I only spoke of doing things to
copies of public domain objects.

>Also, the other side of this is that if you modify a copyrighted object
>you may copyright your modifications, but you still cannot distribute
>the results without the approval of the original copyright holder.

At last, somethig I can agree with.  (Well, not quite.  Actually you can
distribute it if you don't copy it.  That is, if you buy a fresh copy
from the original copyrightholder each time, you can then modify and
sell that copy, barring some contractual agreement to the contrary.)
-- 
	+1 617-492-8860		Donald E. Eastlake, III
	ARPA:  dee at CCA-UNIX	usenet:	{decvax,linus}!cca!dee