Hyman Rosen wrote: [... 17 USC 201(c) ...]
That section of the copyright act is utterly irrelevant in the GPL context, silly. http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/62357178_2.html ------ Before the 1976 Act, there was much disagreement about the relationship between copyright ownership in individual and collective works.(48) According to the doctrine of indivisibility, many perceived copyright as incapable of being divided into smaller rights and could only be secured if copyright "notice" appeared in the name of the copyright owner.(49) Thus, authors who granted rights to publish their articles were often in grave risk of inadvertently losing their rights to publishers or injecting their work into the public domain.(50) The doctrine weakened in Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc.,(51) holding that a copyright in the name of a periodical provides protection to an author where she has sold a right of first publication, and Congress abolished this with the 1976 Act. To this end, Congress intended for section 201(c) to elucidate the "relationship between copyright ownership in a contribution and in the collective work in which it appears."(52) The first sentence of this section merely reiterates section 103(b): "Copyright in each separate contribution to a collective work is distinct from copyright in the collective work as a whole, and vests initially in the author of the contribution." With the second sentence of section 201(c), along with the notice provision of section 404,(53) Congress meant to preserve the author's copyright in an underlying work "even if the contribution does not bear a separate notice in the author's name, and without requiring any unqualified transfer of rights to the owner of the collective work."(54) Under this section, if there is no express transfer of the copyright or related rights, "the owner of copyright in the collective work is presumed to have acquired only the privilege of reproducing and distributing the contribution as part of that particular collective work, any revision of that collective work, and any later collective work in the same series."(55) The owner may not utilize the underlying work for any purposes falling outside of this statutory description. Falling short of explicitly defining "revision," the House Report provides several examples of permissible and impermissible revisions: Under the language of this clause, a publishing company could reprint a contribution from one issue in a later issue of its magazine, and could reprint an article from a 1980 edition of an encyclopedia in a 1990 revision of it; the publisher could not revise the contribution itself or include it in a new anthology or an entirely different magazine or other collective work.(56) How the courts should interpret the language of section 201(c) in view of the House Report is at the heart of the present inquiry. As a prelude to addressing this question directly, this Note considers the following hypothetical scenario and how it relates to the 1976 Act. C. A Hypothetical Case Infringement Press (I-Press) publishes the hardcover 1998 Anthology of Contemporary Poetry comprised of poems written and copyrighted by living poets. Shortly following publication, I-Press arranges for the sale of the individual copies of poems through Kwik-Copy which simultaneously offers the full collection in a binder format. Moreover, across the heading of each copy reads, "From the 1998 Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Infringement Press, 1998, page 101, also available from Kwik-Copy in full form." It is clear that I-Press, as owner of copyright in a collective work, is authorized by section 201(c) to revise its anthology from a hardbound to a binder version and market it through any legal means it sees fit. The mere changing of a print format without altering content would fit squarely within the statutory definition of revision. But presuming there are no written assignments of copyrights in the poetry, dismantling the anthology and selling the individual poems violates the poets' section 106(1) exclusive right of reproduction. Under section 201(c), I-Press may only reproduce and distribute the contribution as part of that particular collective work, any revision of it, or a later collective work in the same series.(57) The photocopies cannot individually be considered the particular collective work, revisions of the anthology, or a later work in a series.(58) To the contrary, these photocopy reprints violate the poets' copyrights in their contributions, making I-Press vulnerable to an infringement suit based on a straightforward reading of the 1976 Act. With this hypothetical as a backdrop, Parts III and IV focus on the two leading cases which directly address the definition of revision under section 201(c). Tasini v. New York Times originated as a 1997 district court case and was reversed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in late 1999. The case has attracted much attention because it addresses an issue of first impression, and writers and publishers perceive that there is much at stake. While not centrally addressing electronic media per se, Ryan v. Carl Corp. offers an alternate view of the legislative history of the 1976 Act and may predict a future split over section 201(c) interpretation akin to that seen previously in other areas of copyright law.(59) ------ regards, alexander. -- http://gng.z505.com/index.htm (GNG is a derecursive recursive derecursion which pwns GNU since it can be infinitely looped as GNGNGNGNG...NGNGNG... and can be said backwards too, whereas GNU cannot.) _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
