Klarinet Archive - Posting 000423.txt from 1998/08

From: Oliver Seely <oliver@-----.EDU>
Subj: RE: [kl] Copyrights
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1998 22:01:05 -0400

To Keven's points once again,

>It is a violation of the copyright law

and

>Bringing a lawsuit is a business decision.

I would hazard that it is even worse than that. The Feist vs. Rural case
convinced me that if whatever one does impacts sufficiently negatively on
the profits of a company, you'll get sued, hands down, even if
it is reasonably clear that what you have chosen to offer is material
in the public domain. I'm sure that the folks at Rural believed sincerely
to have owned the copyright to the names of people in their white pages.
The Supreme Court ruled against them. I am equally convinced that there
are publishers who believe sincerely that they own the music of composers
long dead.

Although my intent is positively NOT to infringe on anyone's copyright, that
finally may be irrelevent if some publisher feels that what I've offered
is having a sufficiently negative input on profits. For my part, I'd
be mortified to discover that anything I've offered is any different from
the placement of notes, dynamics and articulation intended by composers
dead years before there were even such things as copyright laws.

In my profession I have an interest in making available on the Web all of the
(uncopyrightable) facts in the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. That
process has already begun slowly and will pick up momentum over the next
few years. My guess is that at some point the Chemical Rubber Publishing
Company will sue, even though people's presentations will clearly be different
from the CRC's (digital medium, machine-reformattable).

It behooves all of us in this new Age of Information to fine tune our
understanding of copyright law, but as I've said before, not to be intimidated
by extravagant claims of copyright holders.

Oliver

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