[rollei_list] Re: Copyright Law
- From: Marc James Small <marcsmall@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 02 Dec 2009 02:17:20 -0500
At 01:30 AM 12/2/2009, David Sadowski wrote:
>Congress has extended the length of copyright protection on a number
>of occasions. But in each case, they simply said that something that
>was currently under copyright would retain that status for a longer
>period. That is not "ex post facto law," as someone claimed.
>
>Anything that was in the public domain already when these various
>extensions were passed stays that way.
Thank you, David. However, the US Government
does take the position that matters in the public
domain had their copyright revived with the
various extensions. The issue is most murky --
to date, there has only been one case dealing
with it, and that tangentially, and no one really
wants the matter taken before the Roberts Court,
which would almost certainly adopt your
position. The European Union would be unhappy at
that, as they want the copyright revival to be the universal norm.
Project Guttenberg is an archive of scanned
books. To get them to include a work, you have
to go to far lengths to prove that the
publication really is in the public domain. (I
was at the edge of a project several years ago to
get the works of H Beam Piper onto Guttenberg,
and I know the care they take to ensure that a
work is not subject to copyright.) GoogleBooks,
on the other hand, just scans and posts and sees
if anyone objects. (If they are uncertain, they
will just post a precis of the book and the publications details.)
Again, we really will not know the real state of
the law until the matter has been fairly presented in the Federal courts.
Marc
msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cha robh bàs fir gun ghràs fir!
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