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* upon the birth of a piece of creative work, the right to copy it, distribute the copies, sell them, modify the original and disseminate the modified version (a translation, a remix, etc.) belongs exclusively to the author – all rights are reserved;
* upon the birth of a piece of creative work, the right to copy it, distribute the copies, sell them, modify the original and disseminate the modified version (a translation, a remix, etc.) belongs exclusively to the author – all rights are reserved;
* when the author dies, the abovementioned rights belong, equally exclusively, to the author’s legal heirs for a period of time that, generally speaking, may vary from 30 to 100 years (but is usually 50 or 70);
* when the author dies, the abovementioned rights belong, equally exclusively, to the author’s legal heirs for a period of time that, generally speaking, may vary from 30 to 100 years (but is usually 50 or 70);
* then, when the copyright term expires, the work enters the public domain, which means that anyone is legally entitled to copy, distribute, sell, modify the work; those who were previously the exclusive holders of the rights are not entitled to any privilege any longer and have, in fact, the same status as all other members of the public; no rights are reserved, except for, in some cases, the few “soft” provisions we call “moral rights” (see below, [[#Contracts, and constraints unrelated to intellectual property|§ ''Contracts, and constraints unrelated to intellectual property]]'').
* then, when the copyright term expires, the work enters the public domain, which means that anyone is legally entitled to copy, distribute, sell, modify the work; those who were previously the exclusive holders of the rights are not entitled to any privilege any longer and have, in fact, the same status as all other members of the public; no rights are reserved, except for, in some cases, the few “soft” provisions we call “moral rights” (see below, [[#Contracts, constraints unrelated to intellectual property, and politeness|§ Contracts, constraints unrelated to intellectual property, and politeness]]).


The public domain is meant to be a guarantee that culture is not forever subject to the monetary laws of buying and selling. In spite of local differences in copyright legislation, it is remarkable that in every last country on Earth the copyright term is finite, and ''all'' jurisdictions share the moral understanding that it is right for the public to eventually be free to do anything they want with a piece of writing, of music, of visual art, etc.
The public domain is meant to be a guarantee that culture is not forever subject to the monetary laws of buying and selling. In spite of local differences in copyright legislation, it is remarkable that in every last country on Earth the copyright term is finite, and ''all'' jurisdictions share the moral understanding that it is right for the public to eventually be free to do anything they want with a piece of writing, of music, of visual art, etc.
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In the second half of the 20th century, it was them who made (or sometimes delegated) decisions about what to publish and how and it was them who had a right to receive royalties for the sales of books.
In the second half of the 20th century, it was them who made (or sometimes delegated) decisions about what to publish and how and it was them who had a right to receive royalties for the sales of books.


Rhees died in 1989, Anscombe in 2001, and Von Wright in 2003. Although we were unable to find a detailed account of their wills and testaments, it is clear that, after their deaths, the copyright holders for Wittgenstein’s writings were The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. This leads us to think that it was Rhees’s, Anscombe’s, and Von Wright’s joint will to elect Trinity as the heir to the intellectual property of Wittgenstein’s writings.
Rhees died in 1989, Anscombe in 2001, and Von Wright in 2003. Although the author of this essay was unable to find a detailed account of their wills and testaments, it is clear that, after their deaths, the copyright holders for Wittgenstein’s writings became The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. This leads us to think that it was Rhees’s, Anscombe’s, and Von Wright’s joint will to elect Trinity as the heir to the intellectual property of Wittgenstein’s writings.
 
29 April 2021 was the 70th anniversary of Wittgenstein’s death and on 1 January 2022 Wittgenstein’s Writings entered the public domain in those countries where the copyright term is 70 years P.M.A. (''post mortem auctoris'', i.e., “after the author’s death”). This includes the European Union, most of Africa, Asia and Oceania, most Latin American Countries and Canada. In some countries, for example the United States, some of Wittgenstein’s works are still copyrighted. There, it is still Trinity who counts as the copyright holder.
 
 
<div class="custom-desktop-only">[[File:World copyright-terms nokey.svg|600px|center|link=]] [[file:World copyright-terms key wide plain.svg|600px|center|link=]]</div>
<div class="custom-mobile-only">[[File:World copyright-terms nokey.svg|thumb|center|link=]] [[file:World copyright-terms key wide plain.svg|thumb|center|link=]]</div>


29 April 2021 was the 70th anniversary of Wittgenstein’s death and on 1 January 2022 Wittgenstein’s Writings entered the public domain in countries where the copyright term is 70 years P.M.A. (''post mortem auctoris'', i.e., “after the author’s death”). This includes the European Union, most of Africa, Asia and Oceania, most Latin American Countries and Canada. In some countries, for example the United States, some of Wittgenstein’s works are still copyrighted. There, it is still Trinity who counts as the copyright holder.


In the next few sections, we will examine from the point of view of copyright: the relationship between Wittgenstein’s handwritten or typewritten originals and transcriptions, curated editions, and translations; the relevance, or lack thereof, of the ownership of the material papers to intellectual property; the complications of international copyright law in the age of the internet; the copyright status of individual published works by Ludwig Wittgenstein.
In the next few sections, we will examine from the point of view of copyright: the relationship between Wittgenstein’s handwritten or typewritten originals and transcriptions, curated editions, and translations; the relevance, or lack thereof, of the ownership of the material papers to intellectual property; the complications of international copyright law in the age of the internet; the copyright status of individual published works by Ludwig Wittgenstein.
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On the other hand, photocopies and scans are universally considered to be purely mechanical reproductions of two-dimensional objects, and therefore do not entail the formation of a new layer of copyright. This is true even for faithful, frontal photographs of paintings or other two-dimensional works of art. The example here will be much more relevant: since the original handwritten and typescript notes taken by Wittgenstein are now in the public domain in Europe, the scans that are available on Wittgenstein Source are now in the public domain too. No matter how expensive or time-consuming scanning thousands of pages was, such effort was not of a creative nature, and copyright laws do not cover its output.<ref>Thomas Margoni, ''{{plainlinks|[https://web.archive.org/web/20190512145439/http://outofcopyright.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/digitisation_cultural_heritage-thomas-margoni.pdf The digitisation of cultural heritage: originality, derivative works and (non) original photographs]}}'', Institute for Information Law (IViR), Faculty of Law, University of Amsterdam.</ref>
On the other hand, photocopies and scans are universally considered to be purely mechanical reproductions of two-dimensional objects, and therefore do not entail the formation of a new layer of copyright. This is true even for faithful, frontal photographs of paintings or other two-dimensional works of art. The example here will be much more relevant: since the original handwritten and typescript notes taken by Wittgenstein are now in the public domain in Europe, the scans that are available on Wittgenstein Source are now in the public domain too. No matter how expensive or time-consuming scanning thousands of pages was, such effort was not of a creative nature, and copyright laws do not cover its output.<ref>Thomas Margoni, ''{{plainlinks|[https://web.archive.org/web/20190512145439/http://outofcopyright.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/digitisation_cultural_heritage-thomas-margoni.pdf The digitisation of cultural heritage: originality, derivative works and (non) original photographs]}}'', Institute for Information Law (IViR), Faculty of Law, University of Amsterdam.</ref>


A verbatim transcription configures the same scenario. As no creativity is involved, for example, an HTML document that reproduces the text and the formatting of one of Wittgenstein’s manuscripts is not of itself eligible for copyright protection and is in the public domain if the original is. In the context of Wittgenstein studies, the case of the Wittgenstein Archives Bergen’s transcription of the ''Nachlass'' must be discussed explicitly. Under the direction of Profs Claus Huitfeldt and Alois Pichler and over more than 30 years, the WAB has rendered the scholarly community an invaluable service by providing excellent, extremely rich transcriptions of Wittgenstein’s manuscripts and typescripts that, at the moment of this writing, can be accessed online at no cost. The XML files created by the WAB include all the information which the originals themselves contain – emphases, strikeouts, alternatives, sidenotes, page breaks, and much more – and make it possible for the user to select which information set should be dynamically displayed.<ref>{{plainlinks|[http://wab.uib.no/index.page The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB)]}}</ref> It is impossible to overestimate the importance of this resource, and the generosity behind the decision – by Trinity and the WAB – of making it available on the internet for free should be duly stressed. The effort that went into making and proofreading the transcriptions should also be recognised. However, this effort cannot count as a creative one. A transcription, even or rather ''especially'' a rich transcription that reproduces all the features of a handwritten or typewritten document, is a 1-to-1 substitution of some visual feature with the corresponding XML tag. If multiple people were to transcribe the same text, the output would have to be absolutely identical: this is enough reason to consider the activity as a non-creative activity. The same argument, however, can perhaps be expressed in an even more striking way: once a handwritten or typewritten paper original is transcribed into a rich text document whose markup incorporates all the information that was present in the original itself, this can (and must, for this is the whole point of the procedure) then be rendered as a document, for example a web page, that visually reproduces all the features of the original; in other words, the visual features of the text (emphases, additions, deletions, etc.) can be transformed into markup and markup can be transformed back into visual features; to put it in a very Wittgensteinian way,<ref>[[Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (English)#4.04|''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'', 4.04]].</ref> the original and the transcription have the same “mathematical multiplicity”, they are in a strong sense interchangeable, and the latter does not add anything creative to the former, no matter how painstakingly long and accurate the procedure is. (Within the frame of this argument, it also becomes even clearer why translations, on the other hand, are and should be considered creative works: there is no way a translation can be “translated back” into the original text: if one tried to reconstruct the German text of the ''Tractatus'' by translating an English version back into German, the result would obviously be very different than the actual original.)<ref>Of course, the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project has no intention to duplicate the WAB’s excellent work and even less to overshadow it. The scope of our project is, and is meant to be, complementary to theirs, in that we aim at making edited ''Leseausgaben'' available as opposed to “raw” source materials and our target audience is the general public as opposed to the academics. Se the following section, [[#Contracts, politeness, and constraints unrelated to intellectual property|§ Contracts, politeness, and constraints unrelated to intellectual property]], for a brief comment on “politeness” in this context.</ref>
A verbatim transcription configures the same scenario. As no creativity is involved, for example, an HTML document that reproduces the text and the formatting of one of Wittgenstein’s manuscripts is not of itself eligible for copyright protection and is in the public domain if the original is. In the context of Wittgenstein studies, the case of the Wittgenstein Archives Bergen’s transcription of the ''Nachlass'' must be discussed explicitly. Under the direction of Profs Claus Huitfeldt and Alois Pichler and over more than 30 years, the WAB has rendered the scholarly community an invaluable service by providing excellent, extremely rich transcriptions of Wittgenstein’s manuscripts and typescripts that, at the moment of this writing, can be accessed online at no cost. The XML files created by the WAB include all the information which the originals themselves contain – emphases, strikeouts, alternatives, sidenotes, page breaks, and much more – and make it possible for the user to select which information set should be dynamically displayed.<ref>{{plainlinks|[http://wab.uib.no/index.page The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB)]}}</ref> It is impossible to overestimate the importance of this resource, and the generosity behind the decision – by Trinity and the WAB – of making it available on the internet for free should be duly stressed. The effort that went into making and proofreading the transcriptions should also be recognised. However, this effort cannot count as a creative one. A transcription, even or rather ''especially'' a rich transcription that reproduces all the features of a handwritten or typewritten document, is a 1-to-1 substitution of some visual feature with the corresponding XML tag. If multiple people were to transcribe the same text, the output would have to be absolutely identical: this is enough reason to consider the activity as a non-creative activity. The same argument, however, can perhaps be expressed in an even more striking way: once a handwritten or typewritten paper original is transcribed into a rich text document whose markup incorporates all the information that was present in the original itself, this can (and must, for this is the whole point of the procedure) then be rendered as a document, for example a web page, that visually reproduces all the features of the original; in other words, the visual features of the text (emphases, additions, deletions, etc.) can be transformed into markup and markup can be transformed back into visual features; to put it in a very Wittgensteinian way,<ref>[[Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (English)#4.04|''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'', 4.04]].</ref> the original and the transcription have the same “mathematical multiplicity”, they are in a strong sense interchangeable, and the latter does not add anything creative to the former, no matter how painstakingly long and accurate the procedure is. (Within the frame of this argument, it also becomes even clearer why translations, on the other hand, are and should be considered creative works: there is no way a translation can be “translated back” into the original text: if one tried to reconstruct the German text of the ''Tractatus'' by translating an English version back into German, the result would obviously be very different than the actual original.)<ref>Of course, the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project has no intention to duplicate the WAB’s excellent work and even less to overshadow it. The scope of our project is, and is meant to be, complementary to theirs, in that we aim at making edited ''Leseausgaben'' available as opposed to “raw” source materials and our target audience is the general public as opposed to the academics. Se the following section, [[#Contracts, constraints unrelated to intellectual property, and politeness|§ Contracts, constraints unrelated to intellectual property, and politeness]], for a brief comment on “politeness” in this context.</ref>


From the point of view of Wittgenstein scholarship, the issue of copyright layers is particularly thorny when it comes to assessing the impact of the editors’ work on the very authorship of a published book. In those cases where the editors’ intervention was very significant in selecting and sorting Wittgenstein’s remarks while preparing them for publication, the editors may have to be considered co-authors, thereby extending the copyright term on a work beyond the 70-year period after Wittgenstein’s death. Given the uncertainty of this matter, the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project opted for a cautious approach, which is presented in [[Project:Why are some of Wittgenstein’s texts missing from this website?|a separate essay]].
From the point of view of Wittgenstein scholarship, the issue of copyright layers is particularly thorny when it comes to assessing the impact of the editors’ work on the very authorship of a published book. In those cases where the editors’ intervention was very significant in selecting and sorting Wittgenstein’s remarks while preparing them for publication, the editors may have to be considered co-authors, thereby extending the copyright term on a work beyond the 70-year period after Wittgenstein’s death. Given the uncertainty of this matter, the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project opted for a cautious approach, which is presented in [[Project:Why are some of Wittgenstein’s texts missing from this website?|a separate essay]].


== Contracts, politeness, and constraints unrelated to intellectual property ==
== Contracts, constraints unrelated to intellectual property, and politeness ==
When a person is the holder of the copyright on a given work (because they are the author or because they are the author’s heir), they have the right to sign contracts that give others permission to use the work in specific ways under specific conditions. Typically, an author will sign an agreement with a publisher in order for the latter to print, distribute and sell the book and for the former to receive a sum of money in exchange – often a royalty, i.e., a percentage of the cover price of the copies sold.
When a person is the holder of the copyright on a given work (because they are the author or because they are the author’s heir), they have the right to sign contracts that give others permission to use the work in specific ways under specific conditions. Typically, an author will sign an agreement with a publisher in order for the latter to print, distribute and sell the book and for the former to receive a sum of money in exchange – often a royalty, i.e., a percentage of the cover price of the copies sold.


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