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cc-licenses - RE: Compilation copyright

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: "Sunir Shah" <sunir AT sunir.org>
  • To: "Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts" <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: RE: Compilation copyright
  • Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 12:25:25 -0500

Thomas writes,

>> Copyrights are about morality, not legality.
> No. They are about money.

Money is about morality too, before we forget. But
to recycle something I just wrote to someone else:

Their original creation in the U.S. was to generate
books, but in Europe they became also used for moral
purposes. One reason why everything belongs to you is
that people used to publish others' private journals,
which is a serious invasion of privacy. Further, the
Berne convention denies the ability to waive your
fundamental moral rights. So, even if you sell your
work, you cannot be defamed through that work, nor can
your family after your death.

Copyright for online communities *is* about morality,
not about cash. It's there to allow people the legal
room to talk freely.

That is where I stand. You can disagree, as I'm sure
many of you do, but I'm more concerned with the moral
integrity of my membership.

> BTW: IMHO, you can't get a compilation copyright on a wiki,
> because you do not compile the articles in any creative way.
> Instead, you are just providing the space where people can drop
> them in random order. But IANAL and TINLA.

It's not random. People link in appropriate, conscious,
deliberate, organized ways. The question is, does the site
have an overall compilation copyright or just each individual
author who bothered to construct a link? After all, since
linking is an intrinsic property of the medium, one can
easily claim the authors made links consciously aware of
this for their own intent, versus the site making the
creative choice to turn certain patterns of text into links.

Even if you disagree that the script that the site uses
is sufficient proxy for to edit the compilation, the
compilation copyrights are mostly anonymous, and anonymous
copyrights default to the publisher until they can be
adequately proven otherwise. What is considered adequate
varies by jurisdiction. I'm unclear what that actually
entails, but in the U.S. it seems that you have to
register the copyright.

SS




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