Chris Little wrote:
I think the examples were intended to show the *spirit* of the law. They were not intended to be an exhaustive list but a *representational* list. You can not just make up new items in the list to be covered under the law and then justify your invention as being the items that were 'left out of the list because it is not exhaustive.' Anything that should be considered to be covered under the definition of "derivative" must be similar in spirit to these examples. That is exactly what examples are for. They are models. This is some major legal kung-fu you are doing here to make the concordance a derivative work. Obviously this kind of facisism was not the goal of the law, but perhaps using the twisted logic you have presented here, lawyers have made it seem thus. Personally i find it hard to believe that most courts would sustain these arguments considering the fact that a person can play a rift from a song, in fact the exact tune from a song, and change the words, and call it a parody.A concordance is the quotation of an entire work. It doesn't matter how you re-order it or in what manner you change the text, it is still derived.
Under these blanket definitions a person can not even write a book *about* another author's work(s), for example a critique, because that would be a "derivative" work, "necessarily requiring" the original work.
If you make B out of A, then B is a derivative of A. If you make a
concordance of the NIV, it necessarily requires use of the NIV--that is
words themselves--so it is a derivative. If you took an ASCII text of the
NIV, gzipped it, uuencoded it, fed the result to a printer, and bound the
printed papers without telling anyone what it really was, it would STILL
be a derivative work.
Actual ability to reproduce the original is irrelevent, but of somePerhaps i misunderstand one thing: does the concordance actually *quote* the NIV? does it show passages from it? If so then the concordance is definitely not going to be in violation of the law.
importance is the fact that a lot of information from the source text is
being copied, without license, into the derivative. It is enough to glean
a lot of details about how the NIV translates certain words without
needing an NIV. For example, if you know that a certain word in a certain
verse is by some translations rendered "love" and by others "like", you
could easily do a search on that verse to retrieve all words it contains. By investigating that list for the words "love", "like", and similar, you
can probably figure out how the NIV renders that particular word.
However, i was assuming the concordance was merely indexing individual words to the verse numbers in which they occur. In this case, i don't think for a moment the concordance would be in violation, although with a mischevious lawyer and a bumbling judge, anything is possible.
You need to make up your mind here. Your basis for why something is considered a "derivative" work was that the work could be reasonably reconstructed from the derivative. However, you now say it's irrelevant. Then you go on to talk about "details about how the NIV translates" being deduced by the individual words being *compared* to other translations. Once again, this is not going to lead to any place that is near the NIV without some major Kung-Fu reconstruction -- in fact, the kind that scholar try to do by piece together fragments of scrolls and filling in the blanks by guessing -- actually doing this from a concordance is even worse, since you don't have text chunks, but just verse numbers, and you must even use an outside source (a different translation) to piece the darn "NIV" (your own guess at what it is) together. Well by golly, it is not as though the NIV is some top secret thing! The fact is, a person who goes through that much trouble to pirate *anything* might just very well photocopy the whole thing. That does not mean that owning a physical copy of the NIV is wrong just because conceivably your friend might come to your house, and might steal your NIV over night, and take it to Kinkos and photocopy the whole thing! Nor does writing or owning a concordance automatically make that work in violation of copyright law just because someone *might* go through all the painstaking effort to reconstruct the (readily available) NIV text from it!
Although i personally think it is wrong for the copyright law to forbid this, i will say that it is much easier to make it do thus, since it can be argued that a painting represents a story.Being "[b]asically the same as the original" isn't necessary. A painting based on a scene from a novel isn't even remotely similar to the expression in the novel, but it's a derivative work.
In practice it would be extremely difficult for a painting to present the story. It would take a series of paintings, or a comic book, to represent the story. Note: if an artist earns money by having a painting of a scene from "Men in Black" hanging in a gallery, he is probably going to get sued. If a school has a fundraiser where they charge people to view an "art gallery" of the works of the students on campus, and one of the children paints their rendition of a scene from the same movie, no one is going to sue the school. I am not sure this is relevant, but i thought it was interesting how the issue of profit is usually somehow involved.
Does this one do that? Unless it shows snippets of the text for each word instance, it does not quote the entire work. By the way, i was once in Bible Quiz, where we memorized large chunks of the Bible word for word. When i was in it, we used the King James, but right after my last year, the program switched to NIV. There are children from that program who can quote entire books of the Bible in NIV word for word. These people could conceivably be considered in violation of the law, according to your reasoning, since their very minds and mouths can at will create an audio "derivative" work of the NIV..... in fact, not even a derivative but a *straight copy* of it. All it takes is someone to *listen* to these children quote, or of course, the children may sometimes be broadcast on Christian TV networks quoting the scripture (word for word).Works that cite an
original work are not derivative, but that's not what concordances do. Concordances quote the entire work.
Well i'm not criticizing what you say, but the reasoning you are presenting. I hope very much that you don't side with this kind of reasoning. :P I assume you do not. I am convinced that you can get a skilled lawyer to argue what i am saying. I think that what i am saying would hold up in court long before what you are saying would.... however that might not be true if some evil and strong precedents have already screwed things up, and that would not suprise me considering the nasty state our Patent and Copright systems are in. :(
But, hey, don't believe me. Call UBS; ask them if they would consider it
a derivative work. Hire a copyright lawyer; ask him if it would legally
be considered a derivative work.
At any rate, have a nice weekend! :)
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