On Sun, Jun 22, 2003, Ely Levy wrote about "[OT] A call for a lawyer": > a) If someone put non copyright metirial like the bible or some other > jewish book which has expired copyright on the internet can I freely copy > it or does it fall under some copyright law?
Before I say anything I must make it clear that I'm not a lawyer. Furthermore, lawyers would call everything I'm going to say now "hearsay", i.e., stuff I once heard or that I think that I once heard and might be plagued by my memory holes, wishful thinking and misconceptions. I hope that someone with actual legal education can step-in on this discussion and give a more authoritative answer. The answer, as far as I know, is NO: someone CANNOT copyright, in Israel, the *text* of the Bible just because he spent a year OCRing it and correcting OCR errors. Earlier this year there was a lecture-series on the "Universita Meshuderet" (Galey Zahal) on the subject of Intellectual Property. The lecturer was Dr. Niva Elkin-Koren [1], a law professor in HaifaU that specializes in the areas of technology and intellectual property. In one of the lectures, Dr. Elkin-Koren said something that I found very very interesting: she said (paraphrasing what I can recall) that in Israel, you can only copyright something if non-trivial amount of creation and creativity was involved in making it. Hard work has nothing to do with Israeli copyright. For example, typing a public-domain bible into a computer word per word certainly involves a lot of hard work, but zero creativity. There is no content in the generated file that did no exist in the original bible. This hard work cannot be copyrighted, and the new computer-file cannot be copyrighted. If I remember correctly, Dr. Elkin-Koren also said that in this respect, the U.S. copyright differs from the Israeli one, and that in the U.S., the result of hard but mechanical, non-creative, work *can* be copyrighted. When this lecture series comes out in print, it should probably be quite interesting for the readers of this mailing list. I didn't see it this Shvu`a Ha-Sefer, though. If anybody here has contacts in HaifaU's law department, you can try asking Dr. Elkin-Koren herself about this issue. Or try asking another lawyer with knowledge in Israeli intellectual property laws. [1] http://law.haifa.ac.il/faculty/eng/personal_page.asp?lec_id=4 -- Nadav Har'El | Sunday, Jun 22 2003, 23 Sivan 5763 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Those are my principles. If you don't http://nadav.harel.org.il |like them, I have others. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
