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

For example, in summer 2022, thanks to Prof Sacha Raoult’s kind intervention and helpful mediation, the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project received permission from the Directors of the Centre Gilles-Gaston Granger at the Aix-Marseille Université to publish a web edition of Granger’s French translation of the ''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus''. During the autumn and winter of the same year, the volunteers of the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project scanned a paper edition of the book and, with a combination of OCR, manual transcribing, and proofreading, they generated the MediaWiki source code for the text, which is used by the websites’s parser to generate the page’s HMTL “on the fly”; the latter, in turn, is rendered visually by web browsers. The procedure was neither easy nor simple, and it was clearly time-consuming; it required knowledge of the French language, understanding of MediaWiki and HMTL markup, familiarity with the logical and mathematical notation used by Wittgenstein and with the LaTeX syntax for writing and typesetting the formulae. However, this process cannot be regarded as original or creative, because it is a verbatim transcription, that is, a 1-to-1 substitution of some character or formatting feature with a corresponding character or XML tag (the fact that, in MediaWiki syntax, XML tags are mostly replaced by other markup conventions is of no import). Particularly in the case of the transcription of a printed text, where there is no issue of interpreting potentially ambiguous handwriting, if multiple people were to transcribe the same text, the output would have to be absolutely identical: the output is process-agnostic, and this is enough reason to consider the activity as a non-creative activity. No new layer of copyright is generated by the transcription; in the case of Granger’s translation of the ''Tractatus'', the copyright owners agreed to the publication of the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project’s digital edition, but the French texts remains copyrighted and available under an “all rights reserved licence”; however, when the copyright term will expire on Granger’s translation, the digital edition will be in the public domain too, regarless of how long the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project volunteers will live.  

The same argument that was expressed in the above paragraph can, perhaps, be expressed in an even more striking way: once an original is transcribed into a plain text source the markup of which incorporates all the information that was present in the original itself, such a source can always 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>See [[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 from the 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 to make 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 could be argued that a significant degree of competence is, however, required in order to successfully complete a transcription such as that of the ''Tractatus'', and that not everyone would be able to do it, and that therefore the task is more than merely mechanical. The reply to this is as follows: no transcription into a digital format could ever be done by a person who cannot read and write, because, even if (as a stretch) it is thinkable that indivual strokes of ink may be reproduced by pen or pencil without interpreting them as a sequence of letters and words, the very fact of using a keyboard requires the ability to switch seamlessly from lowercase to uppercase and to understand the difference between an “O” and a “0”, between a lowercase “L” and a capital “I”, etc., that is, it requires the ability to read and write. Now, it is agreed that copying a text verbatim is not a creative activity. It should also be acknowledged that the divide between not being able to read and write and being able to do so is greater than the divide between, for example, not understanding MediaWiki markup and understanding it, or between being familar with Wittgenstein logical and mathematical notation and not being familiar with it. Therefore, if the competence needed to transcribe a text into Microsoft Word (that is, the ability to read and write) is not enough to make that activity creative, then the competence needed to transcribe all the formatting and the exotic features of the ''Tractatus'' into MediaWiki is not enough to make ''that'' activity creative. More generally, even if it is true that a certain degree of competence is necessary in order to achieve an acceptable level of accuracy in a complex transcription, that does not mean that a new copyright layer is created in the process, because that degree of competence has nothing to do with creativity or originality.

For transcriptions of handwritten materials which set themselves a goal that goes beyond providing a digital version of the text, different conclusions may have to be drawn because different hypotheses may have to be taken into account. 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 <span class="plainlinks">[http://wab.uib.no/transform/wab.php?modus=opsjoner transcriptions of the ''Nachlass'']</span> must now be discussed explicitly.