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<div class="custom-mobile-only">[[File:World copyright-terms nokey.svg|thumb|center]] [[file:World copyright-terms key wide plain.svg|thumb|center]]</div> | <div class="custom-mobile-only">[[File:World copyright-terms nokey.svg|thumb|center]] [[file:World copyright-terms key wide plain.svg|thumb|center]]</div> | ||
<p style="text-align: center; color: #54595d;">This map provides a simplified overview of the duration of copyright terms 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.<ref name="hirtle-chart">See ''{{plainlink|[https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain Copyright Term and the Public Domain]}}'', Cornell University Library, retrieved 30 July 2022 ({{plainlink|[https://web.archive.org/web/20220711133814/https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain archived URL]}}).</ref> Moreover, even in those cases where a country’s copyright term is a definite period after the author’s death, exceptions may extend copyright further; in France, for example, where the duration of the copyright term is 70 years P.M.A., copyright lasts longer for those authors who died at war and officially count as ''morts pour la France''—among them, famously, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.<ref>See {{plainlink|[https://www.sne.fr/editeur-et-auteur/duree-des-droits-dauteurs/ Durée des droits d’auteur]}}, Syndicat national de l’édition, 2 Novembre 2017, retrieved 30 July 2022 ({{plainlink|[https://web.archive.org/web/20220730141446/https://www.sne.fr/editeur-et-auteur/duree-des-droits-dauteurs/ archived URL]}})./ref></p> | <p style="text-align: center; color: #54595d;">This map provides a simplified overview of the duration of copyright terms 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.<ref name="hirtle-chart">See ''{{plainlink|[https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain Copyright Term and the Public Domain]}}'', Cornell University Library, retrieved 30 July 2022 ({{plainlink|[https://web.archive.org/web/20220711133814/https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain archived URL]}}).</ref> Moreover, even in those cases where a country’s copyright term is a definite period after the author’s death, exceptions may extend copyright further; in France, for example, where the duration of the copyright term is 70 years P.M.A., copyright lasts longer for those authors who died at war and officially count as ''morts pour la France''—among them, famously, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.<ref>See ''{{plainlink|[https://www.sne.fr/editeur-et-auteur/duree-des-droits-dauteurs/ Durée des droits d’auteur]}}'', Syndicat national de l’édition, 2 Novembre 2017, retrieved 30 July 2022 ({{plainlink|[https://web.archive.org/web/20220730141446/https://www.sne.fr/editeur-et-auteur/duree-des-droits-dauteurs/ archived URL]}}).</ref></p> | ||
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For example, the photograph of a three-dimensional object is universally considered a creative work, because of the choices that need to be made by the author in terms of angle, framing, composition, lighting, focus, focal length, shutter speed, aperture, etc. Even though the Nike of Samothrace is in the public domain, each of the photographs of it that are created daily are protected by copyright. | For example, the photograph of a three-dimensional object is universally considered a creative work, because of the choices that need to be made by the author in terms of angle, framing, composition, lighting, focus, focal length, shutter speed, aperture, etc. Even though the Nike of Samothrace is in the public domain, each of the photographs of it that are created daily are protected by copyright. | ||
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 also true for frontal photographs of paintings or other two-dimensional works of art. The example here will be much more relevant: since the original handwritten and typewritten notes taken or dictated by Wittgenstein are now in the public domain in most countries, the scans that are available on the {{plainlink|[http://www.wittgensteinsource.org/ Wittgenstein Source]}} website are now in the public domain too, at least in those countries where copyright expires 70 years or fewer P.M.A. No matter how expensive or time-consuming scanning thousands of pages was, such effort was not of a creative nature, it did not leave room for originality, and copyright laws do not cover its output.<ref>For further details on this subject, see Thomas Margoni, ''{{plainlink|[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, p. 51.</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 also true for frontal photographs of paintings or other two-dimensional works of art. The example here will be much more relevant: since the original handwritten and typewritten notes taken or dictated by Wittgenstein are now in the public domain in most countries, the scans that are available on the {{plainlink|[http://www.wittgensteinsource.org/ Wittgenstein Source]}} website are now in the public domain too, at least in those countries where copyright expires 70 years or fewer P.M.A. No matter how expensive or time-consuming scanning thousands of pages was, such effort was not of a creative nature, it did not leave room for originality, and copyright laws do not cover its output.<ref>For further details on this subject, see Thomas Margoni, ''{{plainlink|[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, 2014, p. 51.</ref> | ||
The same is true for verbatim transcriptions. These are also considered “mechanical”, not in the sense that a machine should be able to carry out the same job as the human transcriber, but in the sense that they are thoroughly faithful reproductions of the text in the abstract sense of the term—i.e., the sequence of characters (letters, numbers, punctuation marks, special characters) with their formatting. | The same is true for verbatim transcriptions. These are also considered “mechanical”, not in the sense that a machine should be able to carry out the same job as the human transcriber, but in the sense that they are thoroughly faithful reproductions of the text in the abstract sense of the term—i.e., the sequence of characters (letters, numbers, punctuation marks, special characters) with their formatting. | ||
Let us produce an 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 Ludwig Wittgenstein Project’s volunteers 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 | Let us produce an 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 Ludwig Wittgenstein Project’s volunteers 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 website’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 very 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, because that too is a 1-to-1 substitution.) Particularly in the case of the transcription of a print edition, 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, in other words, is process-agnostic, and this is enough reason to consider the transcriber’s activity as a non-creative activity. No new layer of copyright is generated by the process. In the case of Granger’s translation of the ''Tractatus'', the copyright owners gave the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project permission to publish its digital edition, but the French texts stays copyrighted and all rights on it remain reserved; however, when the copyright term will expire on Granger’s translation, the digital edition will be in the public domain too, regardless of how long the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project volunteers will live. A verbatim transcription is not of itself eligible for copyright protection and is in the public domain if the original is. | ||
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 file the markup of which incorporates all the information that was present in the original itself, that source file 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.) | 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 file the markup of which incorporates all the information that was present in the original itself, that source file 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.) | ||
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 | 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 individual 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 familiar with Wittgenstein’s 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. | ||
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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—including 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. The question arises whether and to what extent this effort cannot count as a creative one. | 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—including 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. The question arises whether and to what extent this effort cannot count as a creative one. | ||
What was said above remains valid for the WAB transcriptions: insofar as creating a digital edition of a handwritten or typewritten text consists of a 1-to-1 substitution of some visual feature with the corresponding character or XML tag, the output is to be considered a | What was said above remains valid for the WAB transcriptions: insofar as creating a digital edition of a handwritten or typewritten text consists of a 1-to-1 substitution of some visual feature with the corresponding character or XML tag, the output is to be considered a faithtful reproduction of the original material and cannot, in and of itself, be copyrighted. However, two points must be stressed that were not relevant in the case we discussed previously, the example of the French translation of the ''Tractatus'', but are important here. | ||
The first point is that, even though the WAB’s transcriptions are produced in accordance with strict rules based on the {{plainlink|[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_Encoding_Initiative TEI Guidelines]}}, in many cases the transcriber is forced to propose what we may call an interpretation. This is, in turn, not only because Wittgenstein’s handwritten texts, unlike printed texts, may be difficult to decipher on the grounds of the quality of the author’s penmanship; but also and perhaps most importantly because the transcriber must systematically decide whether or not to include some visual items in the transcription based on whether or not they are semantically relevant, and to how to encode them based on what their semantical value is—which is not always trivial. In other words, very often, more than one way of encoding the text is consistent with the rules.<ref>In A. Pichler, “{{plainlink|[http://wab.uib.no/alois/pichler-kirchb95a.pdf Transcriptions, Texts and Interpretation]}}”, in Kjell S. Johannessen and Tore Nordenstam (eds.), ''Culture and Value. Beiträge des 18. Internationalen Wittgenstein Symposiums. 13.-20. August 1995 Kirchberg am Wechsel'', ALWG, 1995, p. 695, retrieved 20 November 2022 ({{plainlink|[https://web.archive.org/web/2/http://wab.uib.no/alois/pichler-kirchb95a.pdf archived URL]}}), Alois Pichler argues that “transcription work is essentially selective and interpretational in nature”. While this wording may be too bold, in the same paper (pp. 693–694) Pichler lists several good reasons why the WAB’s transcription cannot count as literatim transcriptions.</ref> Where there is room for this kind of uncertainty and an interpretation is needed to make up for the uncertainty, there is room for originality too. | The first point is that, even though the WAB’s transcriptions are produced in accordance with strict rules based on the {{plainlink|[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_Encoding_Initiative TEI Guidelines]}}, in many cases the transcriber is forced to propose what we may call an interpretation. This is, in turn, not only because Wittgenstein’s handwritten texts, unlike printed texts, may be difficult to decipher on the grounds of the quality of the author’s penmanship; but also and perhaps most importantly because the transcriber must systematically decide whether or not to include some visual items in the transcription based on whether or not they are semantically relevant, and to how to encode them based on what their semantical value is—which is not always trivial. In other words, very often, more than one way of encoding the text is consistent with the rules.<ref>In A. Pichler, “{{plainlink|[http://wab.uib.no/alois/pichler-kirchb95a.pdf Transcriptions, Texts and Interpretation]}}”, in Kjell S. Johannessen and Tore Nordenstam (eds.), ''Culture and Value. Beiträge des 18. Internationalen Wittgenstein Symposiums. 13.-20. August 1995 Kirchberg am Wechsel'', ALWG, 1995, p. 695, retrieved 20 November 2022 ({{plainlink|[https://web.archive.org/web/2/http://wab.uib.no/alois/pichler-kirchb95a.pdf archived URL]}}), Alois Pichler argues that “transcription work is essentially selective and interpretational in nature”. While this wording may be too bold, in the same paper (pp. 693–694) Pichler lists several good reasons why the WAB’s transcription cannot count as literatim transcriptions.</ref> Where there is room for this kind of uncertainty and an interpretation is needed to make up for the uncertainty, there is room for originality too. | ||
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The second point is that the WAB’s transcriptions also make Wittgenstein’s implicit references to people and books explicit:<ref>See A. Pichler, ''Transcriptions, Texts and Interpretation'', p. 695.</ref> embedded in the XML files are also the full names of people Wittgenstein only mentions by surname or talks about without naming them at all; information about the books Wittgenstein discusses or quotes from without citing the full title; etc.; here, again, the transcriber can then be said to be responsible for an interpretation, and, again, where there is a margin for interpretation (when the multiplicity of the text is not exactly the multiplicity that is needed for the transcription to be unequivocal), there is room for originality too. | The second point is that the WAB’s transcriptions also make Wittgenstein’s implicit references to people and books explicit:<ref>See A. Pichler, ''Transcriptions, Texts and Interpretation'', p. 695.</ref> embedded in the XML files are also the full names of people Wittgenstein only mentions by surname or talks about without naming them at all; information about the books Wittgenstein discusses or quotes from without citing the full title; etc.; here, again, the transcriber can then be said to be responsible for an interpretation, and, again, where there is a margin for interpretation (when the multiplicity of the text is not exactly the multiplicity that is needed for the transcription to be unequivocal), there is room for originality too. | ||
When talking about the transcription of the French print edition of the ''Tractatus'', it was said that because the procedure was tantamount to copying, it did not generate a new copyright layer; when talking about the WAB transcriptions, it should be said that if or when the procedure was tantamount to copying, it did not generate a new copyright layer, but if or when it was not, it did. It could also be agreed to express this conclusion—which, incidentally, is an open conclusion, that does not claim to settle the question of the copyright status of the WAB’s XML files once and for all—by saying that, | When talking about the transcription of the French print edition of the ''Tractatus'', it was said that because the procedure was tantamount to copying, it did not generate a new copyright layer; when talking about the WAB transcriptions, it should be said that if or when the procedure was tantamount to copying, it did not generate a new copyright layer, but if or when it was not, it did. It could also be agreed to express this conclusion—which, incidentally, is an open conclusion, that does not claim to settle the question of the copyright status of the WAB’s XML files once and for all—by saying that, unlike the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project’s digital edition of the Granger translation of the ''Tractatus'', the WAB’s XML files, or at least some of them, are more than just transcriptions.<ref>This claim is made explicitly by Pichler in A. Pichler, ''Transcriptions, Texts and Interpretation'', p. 690.</ref> | ||
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Additional restrictions may make the picture more complicated. | Additional restrictions may 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 to their work. In some countries, they do not expire. 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 is clear that the parody or distortion is attributable to the remixer, and not to the author. Moral rights have limited import as far as copyright and the public domain are concerned: insofar as they entail the obligation to attribute authors, for example, they do restrict the scope of what | 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 to their work. In some countries, they do not expire. 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 is clear that the parody or distortion is attributable to the remixer, and not to the author. Moral rights have limited import as far as copyright and the public domain are concerned: insofar as they entail the obligation to attribute authors, for example, they do restrict the scope of what can be done with public domain works, since by the definition of public domain alone attributing authors whose copyright expired would not be compulsory;<ref>The author of this essay would like to thank Dr Nicolas Bell of Trinity College for providing a comment thanks to which the early, incorrect wording of this sentence was corrected.</ref> however, they entirely lack the characteristic feature of copyright laws that has to do with establishing someone’s monopoly on a set of works. Moral rights have no financial import whatsoever. | ||
Another set of restrictions may arise from the fact that, even after copyright expires, ownership of the original specimen remains. Thus, for example, the Louvre may well forbid visitors to take photos of its paintings—even though most of the works in the museum are out of copyright—simply because they have the authority to dictate the house rules; on the other hand, they have no authority to forbid us to freely share, modify and even sell the faithful reproductions of public-domain two-dimensional works that can be found on their very website. In the case of Wittgenstein, his originals have several different owners—the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge; the Austrian National Library, Vienna; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Noord Hollands Archief, Haarlem; the Bertrand Russell Archives, McMaster University Library, Hamilton<ref>''{{plainlink|[https://wittgenstein-initiative.com/unesco-certificate-and-nomination-form/ UNESCO Certificate and Nomination Form]}}'', Wittgenstein Initiative, 25 January 2018, retrieved 16 July 2022 ({{plainlink|[https://web.archive.org/web/20220716093211/https://wittgenstein-initiative.com/unesco-certificate-and-nomination-form/ archived URL]}}).</ref>—but this also has no import as far as copyright and the public domain are concerned. | Another set of restrictions may arise from the fact that, even after copyright expires, ownership of the original specimen remains. Thus, for example, the Louvre may well forbid visitors to take photos of its paintings—even though most of the works in the museum are out of copyright—simply because they have the authority to dictate the house rules; on the other hand, they have no authority to forbid us to freely share, modify and even sell the faithful reproductions of public-domain two-dimensional works that can be found on their very website. In the case of Wittgenstein, his originals have several different owners—the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge; the Austrian National Library, Vienna; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Noord Hollands Archief, Haarlem; the Bertrand Russell Archives, McMaster University Library, Hamilton<ref>''{{plainlink|[https://wittgenstein-initiative.com/unesco-certificate-and-nomination-form/ UNESCO Certificate and Nomination Form]}}'', Wittgenstein Initiative, 25 January 2018, retrieved 16 July 2022 ({{plainlink|[https://web.archive.org/web/20220716093211/https://wittgenstein-initiative.com/unesco-certificate-and-nomination-form/ archived URL]}}).</ref>—but this also has no import as far as copyright and the public domain are concerned. |