Project:The copyright status of Wittgenstein’s works: Difference between revisions

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 {{plainlink|[http://wab.uib.no/index.page Wittgenstein Archives Bergen]}}’s {{plainlink|[http://wab.uib.no/transform/wab.php?modus=opsjoner transcriptions 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. Beside the texts, the XML files created by the WAB include all the information which the originals themselves contain – emphases, strikeouts, alternatives, sidenotes, page breaks, and more – and allow the user to dynamically select which information set should be displayed.<ref>{{plainlink|[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 – to make 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 a 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 original is transcribed into a rich text document the markup of which 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>

It should be added that, 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]].