On Fri, 11 Feb 2005, Craig J. Lindstrom wrote:
> other things runs commercial digital cameras. One of the uses of this
> software was to digitize a large collection of books, journal and
> manuscripts for the Church History Department so they could publish some
> material that the Copyright was about to expire. The current law is
> something like; "if you don't use the copyrighted material then the
> copyright can not be extended". The church desires to maintain ownership
> (copyright) of these documents, without copyright law all these documents
> would be public property now. Remember there are more important things than
> music and the latest video driver when considering copyright law.
This is somehow confused. Copyright law, unfortunately, doesn't say anything
about "using" material in order to hold on to copyrights; they stick around
essentially forever. Even if it's vintage movies rotting on their reels, if
they were created after the cutoff (1920-something), they'll be copyrighted
indefinitely.
Secondly, you're saying the church is publishing them to keep the copyright?
Publishing implies that secrecy is *not* a goal. Even if it were the goal,
copyright law doesn't offer /secrecy/ as a feature: people can reproduce
copyrighted works for purposes of analysis, education, criticism and parody
without permission from the copyright holder. Eg., check out the
transcriptions of simpsons episodes online -- they intersperse the script with
commentary, making the reproduction totally legit.
-J
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