Life In 19x19

Discussion in this thread prompted me to think of the dreadful subject of copyright.

Do we want a specific policy for the copyright of people's text here at L19?

Clearly people's text is their own copyright when they write it, so by doing nothing, it appears to me that each poster own's the copyright of their own text. If that is the result we want, then doing nothing maybe the best policy.

The corollary of that is a perhaps unfortunate restriction on the ability to copy their text elsewhere, e.g. to Sensei's library.

Is the status quo what we want?

Copyright law is such that each poster owns his own text. Don't get confused by what copyright protects, though. Anyone can copy it and paste it elsewhere - that's the nature of the medium. All that copyright protects is the _financial exploitation_ of said texts. You can't sue someone for a copyright violation if they simply copy it and paste it in, say, another message, or on a wiki.

I think it is very misleading, even wrong, to express it like that, Kirk. For example, if a wiki gets income from adverts from pages that copy your text, they are wrongly exploiting your rights. Copy and paste is only permissible for things like comment or quotation. Posters who post for free initially also have the right to convert their work for gain later on.

But the more important point is that the repeated talk of copyright is always skewed. It misses out a major element. When you create something you get authors' rights, which has two components: copyright and moral rights. For example, you have the right, even if you are thereby losing money, to stop your working being published in, say, a country that favours apartheid.

You can exercise your moral rights in a wide variety of other ways. One that appeals to me is that if you can keep your work in one controlled place, you can correct or update it easily. Once the virus is out of the lab it is uncontrollable, and can even mutate and still be associated with your name.

In any case, if I believed that if were to post a substantial text here and any of it were to end up in a blog or SL or wherever without my permission, I would just not post it here.

John, when I said "financial exploitation", that includes earning money from ads. It's not limited to publishing and selling, as say a book, article or whatever.

You may be surprised to know that "moral rights" are not internationally accepted; notably in the US, where they are very limited. The question arises on the web of which country's laws govern copyright. If I were to "steal" something you wrote, is it, say, the UK, because you are there, or France, because that's where I am, or the country in which a server is hosted? These issues are quite ambiguous, and, as far as I know, have never been settled on an international level.

Moral rights _don't_ give you the right to refuse that a work be executed in a "country that supports apartheid," as far as I know. (I say executed, because this would apply to a work that is performed or displayed; as for publishing, which is based on countries or territories, you may or may not have a contract that allows you to restrict which foreign rights are sold.) Moral rights are about alterations to a work, and nothing more; they are not "moral" in the sense you imply.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_righ ... yright_law)

I do, in general, hate when things have to be explicit with respect to legal agreements. I'm also not a fan of copyright as it currently exists. I've seen too many copyright problems with forums, though.

I'd strongly advocate one of the creative commons attribution/non-commercial licences, and I'd suggest doing it now while there aren't too many posts!

Sorry for not linking to the CC licences, but I'm typing from my phone.

BTW, moral rights have a thorny history. Here are two examples, one where moral rights were upheld and another where they were overturned, for exactly the same issue in two different countries.

http://alia.org.au/publishing/incite/20 ... ckett.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/feb/04/arts.italy

Both involve Samuel Beckett's estate trying to block the use of women actors in Waiting for Godot.

tealeaf wrote:I do, in general, hate when things have to be explicit with respect to legal agreements. I'm also not a fan of copyright as it currently exists. I've seen too many copyright problems with forums, though.

I'd strongly advocate one of the creative commons attribution/non-commercial licences, and I'd suggest doing it now while there aren't too many posts!

Sorry for not linking to the CC licences, but I'm typing from my phone.

I certainly agree. But in that case, we would technically need to have every member agree to that condition when they join, or, for existing members, after the fact. Just to be safe. Not that there will be any issues, but this is the internet, and you never know.

For small pieces of work, I don't care. For larger pieces of work, if I do decide to share it, I usually apply one of the Creative Commons licenses. I tend to favour the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license, such for as my own problem collection.

Kirk, maybe you're too young to remember it, but asserting moral rights not to have a book published in South Africa was once a major issue in UK literary circles and elsewhere. Whether or not it was tested in court, I don't know, but writers felt that to have a book appear there would suggest they were willing to earn money from an oppressed people, and that was prejudicial to their reputation, which is certainly what moral rights are intended to cover.

It is true that the internet throws up lots of new questions about authors' rights, most of which have not been answered, but in a forum like L19, which is based on a sense of community, I would have thought that readers would respect authors as individuals whom, in a way, they know personally. On that basis I'd expect they should also respect an author's intentions. Each author, I'd further expect, would normally act within the confines of the laws he knows best, his own. It then follows that the laws of his country are the ones to respect here, in a community sense if not a legal one.

To me it also seems simplest, as well as honourable, to follow the a priori maxim of don't copy without permission. Anyone on L19 is easily contactable with a request for permission. If some writers want to give blanket permission in advance, they are quite free to do that.

John Fairbairn wrote:Kirk, maybe you're too young to remember it, but asserting moral rights not to have a book published in South Africa was once a major issue in UK literary circles and elsewhere. Whether or not it was tested in court, I don't know, but writers felt that to have a book appear there would suggest they were willing to earn money from an oppressed people, and that was prejudicial to their reputation, which is certainly what moral rights are intended to cover.

Not exactly. And you don't need a moral rights clause to prevent a book, for example, from being published in a given country, _unless_ you've signed away your foreign rights to your publisher. No, I don't see that as necessarily being prejudicial to one's reputation, unless one feels that way. (In other words, it's not a given that a book being published in SA, at the time, would mean an author were evil; quite the contrary. I'm sure many authors would have wanted their books published there to share what they had to say.)

Perhaps there were some British authors who felt it was useful to use that term to make noise, but that's not at all what the moral right clause covers, at least not from what I can find. It does, however, limit the way a work may be altered, which is generally not something that involves books, with, perhaps, the exception of covers. I do, however, know a quite well-known author in the US who was able to sue to have his best-selling novel re-translated in France, because he read parts of it (knowing French) and found it had been massacred. I don't know if his suit was based on a moral right clause or not.

kirkmc wrote:John, when I said "financial exploitation", that includes earning money from ads. It's not limited to publishing and selling, as say a book, article or whatever.

Copyright being restricted to "financial exploitation" is not really correct. Copyright limits distribution. It doesn't matter whether you earn any money with it.

Just think about it: If what you said were true, sharing films over the internet would be legal as long as you don't have ads on the homepage. Or openstreetmap would be allowed to copy commercial maps. And so on...

Of course, in many jurisdictions there are fair-use exemptions for non-commercial use. But non-commercial is not the same as "earning no money".

flOvermind wrote:

kirkmc wrote:John, when I said "financial exploitation", that includes earning money from ads. It's not limited to publishing and selling, as say a book, article or whatever.

Copyright being restricted to "financial exploitation" is not really correct. Copyright limits distribution. It doesn't matter whether you earn any money with it.

Just think about it: If what you said were true, sharing films over the internet would be legal as long as you don't have ads on the homepage. Or openstreetmap would be allowed to copy commercial maps. And so on...

Of course, in many jurisdictions there are fair-use exemptions for non-commercial use. But non-commercial is not the same as "earning no money".

Well, we were talking here about the implications for people copying texts from this forum. Obviously, copyright involves many, many other cases. I didn't want to go into that, because it doesn't apply to our situation.

Well, it has implications to users wanting to copy text from here:

kirkmc wrote:Anyone can copy it and paste it elsewhere - that's the nature of the medium.

That's wrong. By default, noone can copy anything anyone else wrote. That's completely independent of the medium.

Of course there are some exceptions. There's the right to quote. Then there's fair use (whatever that means). And of course there may be a licence that allows certain things that are not allowed by default (legally speaking, if I tell you you may use it, that's a license, too). But if you want to be on the safe side, don't copy anything, ever.

I hereby give anyone permission to use whatever text that I produce on L19 for any purpose said user deems useful, profitable, moral or immoral, except in cases of exploitation or harm to small animals, insects, or other critter-based entities. This includes but is not limited to using a printed copy of my text to swat flies.

Seriously, the creative commons provisions that tealeaf mentions and advocates is exactly what we should adopt and quickly. If you're worried that what you produce here on L19, or any internet forum, may be used for someting you don't like, then don't post it. At some point we need to accept the risks of communicating in order to communicate.

Déjà Vu wrote:Seriously, the creative commons provisions that tealeaf mentions and advocates is exactly what we should adopt and quickly. If you're worried that what you produce here on L19, or any internet forum, may be used for someting you don't like, then don't post it. At some point we need to accept the risks of communicating in order to communicate.

I think such a license is best for collaborative efforts like Sensei's Library, but I can imagine individuals wanting to post things here that they'd prefer to retain copyright over. It's a difficult balance.

But maybe for the purposes of this forum, it's still best to adopt a Sensei's Library-compatible license, and then force those who wish to retain copyright to find another venue. For example, if John Ferryborn wants to post an exerpt from his upcoming article here, he can post it on his blog and post a link here instead. Or if tchan001 wants to post a collection of Chinese books and commentary with the idea that he might want to delete all his posts and make money off the content elsewhere, he should probably just post his books and commentary elsewhere to begin with and post links to it from here. That way anything actually posted here can be considered safe to archive in Sensei's Library and doesn't have the danger of being lost to a database outage or GD-style destruction. But we have to look at what we're losing out by going that route.