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

<p style="text-align: center; color: #54595d;">This map provides a simplified overview of the duration of the copyright term worldwide. Please note that in some countries, for example the US, copyright laws are more complex than elsewhere and knowing that a given number of years has passed since an author’s death is not sufficient for determining the copyright status of their works. In the US, in particular, the publication date of a work often influences its copyright status.</p>

It may happen that creative works become themselves the basis for other creative works. When a text is translated, for example, both the original and the translation count as creative works; when a statue or a building are photographed, both the three-dimensional object and the two-dimensional image count as creative works; etc.

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 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>

<p style="text-align: center; color: #54595d;">The first image is a scan of Wittgensein’s MS-176,19v; the second is the corresponding transcription with HTML markup (for example, the tag <code><nowiki><em></em></nowiki></code> is for emphasis); the third is the transcription as viewed in a web browser. The processes that lead from the first picture to the second (encoding) and from the second to the third (rendering) are both 1-to-1 substitutions (images in the Tractarian sense).</p>

This, as well as the general nature of the public domain itself, is sometimes the subject of misunderstandings because publishers tend to print the copyright symbol “©” or another copyright notice on all books they produce, regardless of the copyright status of the text, possibly hoping to protect the typesetting and layout (which, however, are usually below the {{plainlink|[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality threshold of originality]}}) or perhaps simply trying to discourage photocopying even public domain texts. As I mentioned above ([[#Introduction. The purpose of copyright and the public domain|§ Introduction. The purpose of copyright and the public domain]]), however, adding copyright symbols where they do not belong should be regarded as illegal.

Other restrictions, then, may apply that sometimes make the picture more complicated.

One such restriction is what we call “moral rights”. Moral rights have to do with the author’s dignity as such and with their unique relationship with their work. The definition of moral rights also varies across jurisdictions, but most often they include the right of attribution and the prohibition that works be remixed in a way that negatively affects the author, their image, or their reputation. This wording may seem to forbid adding a moustache to a reproduction of ''Mona Lisa'' or creating a horror version of ''Winnie-the-Pooh'', but in practice such things are widely accepted, as long as it’s clear that the parody or distortion is attributable to the remixer, and not to the author. Moral rights have no import as far as copyright and the public domain are concerned, and no financial import whatsoever. In some countries, they do not expire.

Finally, even in the arid landscape of copyright law and harsh arena of the publishing business, politeness and ''bona fides'' are not without importance. It remains a good practice to inform the former copyright holders or the owners of the originals when a new edition or translation of a public-domain text is planned; and it is crucial that projects which share the same goal of improving the availability of a given cultural asset to the public are well coordinated, do not uselessly compete with each other, and on the contrary work together in a spirit of cooperation or, at least, complementarity. This is as good a place as any to say that if the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project failed to comply with these basic rules of manners it was not because of a slapdash attitude, but because of a failure to identify some of the many stakeholders.