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

Thus, the aim of copyright is, among other things, to make creativity viable on the market by giving authors monopoly over the distribution of the copies of their works. By being the only authorised sellers of those works, albeit often with the intermediation of a publisher, or a label, etc., authors may be able to secure an income.

The rationale for the finite duration of the copyright term is related precisely to the concept, firstly, that the circulation of ideas through the replication of works of art (and fiction, and nonfiction…) is in the interest of the human community, and not only in the interest of the author and their heirs; and, secondly, that if such circulation is free not only in the sense of freedom, but also in that of gratuity, the interest of the human spirit will be much better served.

The logic of copyright and of its term being limited by design, thus, is as follows. Authors should be able to exploit their works financially (in order perhaps, depending on one’s broader moral view, to reward their genius, but also to enable them to keep doing what they do while letting others benefit from their creativity as well). Sooner or later, however, the circulation of such works should stop being subject to the author’s consent or their family’s (in order for the public to fully enjoy the works without limitations of sorts, and especially without having to pay to do so).

* 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;

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.

== A very short history of the rights on Wittgenstein’s writings ==

In the case of a translation of a book the author of which is still alive, for example, the author is the original text’s copyright holder and may licence another party, typically a publisher, to sell a translation; the translator will be the translation’s copyright holder and may in turn licence another party, again the publisher, to sell the translation. The publisher of the translation will need to have agreements with, and usually pay, both the author and the translator.

Since, most often, the translator belongs to a younger generation than the author, “canonical” translations usually enter the public domain significantly later than the corresponding originals.

For example, the photograph of a three-dimensional object is universally considered a creative work, because of the choices that need to be made in terms of angle, framing, composition, lighting, focus, focal length, shutter speed, aperture, etc. Even though the Nike of Samothrace is clearly in the public domain, each of the photographs of it that are created daily are protected by copyright.

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 <span class="plainlinks">[http://wab.uib.no/transform/wab.php?modus=opsjoner transcriptions of the ''Nachlass'']</span> 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. 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>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 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>