False Copyright Claims

FreetoCopy writes "Teenagers downloading music may not be the worst copyright offenders. See this item (available for download in PDF file with free registration) about the growing problem of copyfraud — in which publishers, archives, and distributors make false claims of copyright to shut down free expression. From the paper: 'Copyfraud is everywhere. False copyright notices appear on modern reprints of Shakespeare's plays, Beethoven's piano scores, greeting card versions of Monet's Water Lilies, and even the US Constitution. Archives claim blanket copyright in everything in their collections. Vendors of microfilmed versions of historical newspapers assert copyright ownership. These false copyright claims, which are often accompanied by threatened litigation for reproducing a work without the owner's permission, result in users seeking licenses and paying fees to reproduce works that are free for everyone to use...'"

Hey!

That summary is copyright (c) Me 2007 - take it down now, or I'm sending the lawyers round!

No, you cannot have Fair Use. Not Yours.

Yeah? Well, unfortunately for you, the expressions "That summary is copyright" , "take it down now", and "I'm sending the lawyers round!" are all copyrighted to me in my famous poem "Sue You" (c) 2006:

Sue You
Take it down now
Take it down now
That summary is copright
Take it down now
I'll sue you if you don't
Take it down now
I'm sending the lawyers round!

Your overuse of my IP clearly falls outside the realm of Fair Use, so "take it down now!"

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"Sue You" is obviously a slightly modified version of my poem "Kill My Landord":

Dark and lonely on a summer's night.
Kill my landlord.
Kill my landlord.
Watchdog barking. Do he bite?
Kill my landlord.
Kill my landlord.
Slip in his window. Break his neck.
Then his

Re:No, you cannot have Fair Use. Not Yours.

Sadly for you I copyrighted the vowel in 1999. I count well over 40 offenses in your previous post. Expect a letter from my lawyer.

Re:No, you cannot have Fair Use. Not Yours.

Oh yeah? I've patented the process of rebuttal wars in matters pertaining to copyright claims!

Re:No, you cannot have Fair Use. Not Yours.

Sorry to all of you, but I have a patent on being a smacktard. Pay up!

Scanning insufficient to establish copyright

According to Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corporation [wikipedia.org], scanning a public domain image isn't sufficient to establish copyright on the result, even if considerable skill and expertise is required.

There should be consequence

As far as I can see, there is apparently no consequence for making a false claim of ownership. Perhaps false claims of ownership should result in the loss of their ability to assert copyright at all. Actually, that probably wouldn't be appropriate but I'm at a loss for what would be appropriate in a case of false assertion especially when it should be obvious that they didn't create the works in question.

However, when you create a "derivative work" based on public domain content, it's probably eligible for copyright protection in and of itself. The problem comes from where you draw the line. Perhaps in the interest of preserving the public domain, there should be law stating that any use of public domain material within derivative works should also fall within the public domain. Imagine how viral that could be...

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"Perhaps in the interest of preserving the public domain, there should be law stating that any use of public domain material within derivative works should also fall within the public domain."

You don't need for the derivatives to be public domain, copyleft

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As far as I can see, there is apparently no consequence for making a false claim of ownership. Perhaps false claims of ownership should result in the loss of their ability to assert copyright at all.

Reading this reminded me of a website [eliaskhnaser.com] I came across recen

Re:There should be consequence

Perhaps in the interest of preserving the public domain, there should be law stating that any use of public domain material within derivative works should also fall within the public domain.

That's already the law. You can read it at 17 USC 103(b). But it only covers that portion of the derivative work. So if you, say, make a movie where there is a scene involving you reading one of Shakespeare's sonnets, then the sonnet is still in the public domain. Anyone can watch that movie and copy down the sonnet, rather than having to consult some other source to get it. However, they can't copy anything from the movie that is copyrighted, such as the video or audio of you reciting the sonnet, or the remainder of the movie; only the sonnet itself. This applies to derivatives of anything, by the way; whatever portions of the work are derived from elsewhere keep their original copyright status and do not acquire the status of the newer work. E.g. Disney's 'Fantasia 2000' is mostly going to have a copyright date of 1999, but since part of it ('The Sorcerer's Apprentice') is from the original 1940 movie, that portion is still treated as a 1940 work, and will enter the public domain before the newer parts of the movie.

It's not viral though. The use of public domain materials in a derivative work doesn't make the entire work derivative.

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Part of making a DMCA takedown notice is an oath under penalty of perjury that you hold the copyright to the work in question. The only problem is that perjury is notoriously hard to prosecute (as the prosecution must prove that the alleged knew they were

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From my understanding, when you make a derivative work, that derivative is your copyright. But, you do not own the copyright to the original just because you used it.

There are a lot of examples to work with. A large portion of Disney classics are prime examples - one of my favorites being 20000 Leagues Under the Sea. The story itself is in the public domain - the copyright has expired. But Disney's take on it is no

I fell for copyfraud on the US Constitution

I paid money to the family of King John of England after they claimed it was work derived from something called the "Magna Carta." I think I may have been rooked.

I thought..

I thought that in some instances, you can copyright your presentation of a public domain work.

In other words, people are free to copy the original, but not your [whatever] of the original. /TFA is 75 pages //I like the conclusion

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Thats the way it worked with sheet music well before the DMCA and perhaps since the begining of copyright in american history.

The article, at least the sumery makes a few assumtion forgeting the entire aspect of the copyright.

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I'm pretty sure that Disney bought that 'right'..

In the case of...

...Beethoven's scores, it's not the score itself, it's the arrangement and/or the actual performance or recording that's copyrighted.

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Not everything is an arrangement. You can get new prints of the original scores, and those can't be copyrighted.

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If editors now closely compared traditional printed scores with Beethoven's own sketches and created a score that they believed would be more accurate than what is usually passed down, then the result can be copyright.

Public Domain Can Be Re- Copyrighted

I'm very pro public domain, cc and copy-left but the FA omits some facts.

Although he's right that merely digitizing or copying a public domain work does not result in a new copyright, creating a collection of public domain works does. The individual works remain in the public domain, but you can't copy the "collection" as a whole (eg. scan and upload the book as a whole to the internet) because the creativity of selecting and assembling the work is a new copyright. This, for example, would apply to Dover books of public domain clip art.

Also, public domain music can be re-copyrighted to an extent--unfortunately--because individual arrangements can be copyrighted. You are free to use the original tune, but you can't copy a new arrangement because that arrangement is a new copyright.

Public domain is not GPL. Just because a work is public domain doesn't mean that derivative works will be public domain.

Now, that being said, the article is, otherwise, a good one. I'm tired of museums and "educational" institutions claiming copyright on the public domain works in their collection and copyright on the reproductions of those works. In those cases, no new creativity has occurred and there is no new copyright.

Re:Public Domain Can Be Re- Copyrighted

Although he's right that merely digitizing or copying a public domain work does not result in a new copyright, creating a collection of public domain works does.

Well, it may, but it doesn't necessarily. A compilation is only copyrightable if the selection and arrangement is itself sufficiently creative. And the compilation copyright only pertains to the copyrightable portions of the selection and arrangement; not the materials which compromise the compilation.

As far as I'm concerned

ALL claims of exclusive ownership and control over information are fraudulent. The law itself is a fraud.

What we need is DRM!

Don't go into convulsions just yet!

But we need an effective way for marking content with important details such as copyright owner, copyright date, contact details, and perhaps even licensing details in terms of what the licensor explicitly allows to be done with the content, even if there is no artificial technology restriction imposed on what is disallowed.

For example, if I find a piece of music on the Internet and I want to use it in something that I'm creating, how do I know if I can? Who do I contact? What if I don't even know what the song actually is? Sure enough, even knowing that the copyright holder doesn't want me to do such a thing might not stop me from doing it, but at least I know I'm acting against their wishes.

If we could have some form of DRM that was actually more like "digital rights marking", and survived transcoding/editing, that would probably be very interesting. To the extent that it wasn't used to restrict our actions, but merely make us aware of what we were doing (in terms of our actions being acceptable or otherwise), maybe that's something we as a society could agree to adopt.

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Prehistory for tomorrow begins today.

Practically, I agree it's very hard. To even get the ball rolling we need some kind of a standard that says "you encode the information this way, it should contain the following data, here are some guidelines to help yo

You mean...

... Shakespeare is dead?

punishment is simple...

.... require them to put their legal copyrights into public domain.

music scores

To elaborate on what Stubear said, in the case of scores for old composers, sometimes we don't have a complete, original score. Just parts have survived, possibly from different versions of the work. There can be considerable creativity involved for a modern arranger to put together a score for such a work.

And even if we do have the complete, original, score, it may have been for old instruments. A lute is not the same as a guitar, for example, and when Vivaldi wrote for lute, he knew how it would be tuned, and what fingerings were possible. To make it work on a guitar can be quite a creative challenge.

Even if we still use the same instruments as the composer wrote the piece for, we might want a score for different instruments. You can't just sit down at your piano, or guitar, or with your full orchestra, with the score to, say, Bach's cantata #147 ("Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring") as originally written as a choral work, and start playing. It just won't work. You basically have to rewrite the music for those different settings.

Slander/Libel

From TFA:

The Copyright Act provides for no civil penalty for falsely claiming ownership of public domain materials.

While this may be true, isn't there a way to fire back with a slander/libel charge? (ha! Let's see the pendants call me on this one :)

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Let's see the pendants call me on this one

I hate myself for doing this, but it's spelled "pedant".

Not all false copyrights

Some of the examples given could have valid claims for copyright. Layouts are protected under the Berne Convention. Sure the words of a Shakespeare play are free from copyright but the way they're laid out on a page is classed as a new work. You cannot scan in every page, then print the book as your own. In terms of art pieces on birthday cards, who is to say they haven't done extensive alterations to the original painting? Also, as petty as it may seem, putting "happy birthday" on the front is an original work and although "obvious" design choices could be reproduced in other works, straight out scanning and copying is a no no.

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Layouts are protected under the Berne Convention.

That's interesting. But they're generally not protected in the US. I can imagine cases where they would qualify, but usually typesetting and layout are simply not sufficiently creative to be copyrightable.

How to pay

The works of the public domain are under my copyright. Please fax me a dollar for each use.
--
Mass production solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html [blogspot.com]

As an ebook publisher making pocket change

I must say that I'm not totally sure I agree with this (and I usually am pretty much right on with Slashdot group think on copyright laws).

For instance, I have made a little pocket change reprinting a rare 1863 cookbook. By no means am I getting rich off of it, but I do put a copyright on the ebooks I sell just to have some legal options. I don't care if someone prints it out and OCRs it, there isn't a thing in the world I could do about that. But I had to spend a couple of days OCRing the material, cleaning it up, and formatting it. Anyone else wanting to sell it, or give it away, should have to do the same, not swipe my work.

How exactly should someone be able to just start reselling my ebook and why is that wrong of me to put a copyright notice on it?

Transporter_ii

Re:As an ebook publisher making pocket change

But I had to spend a couple of days OCRing the material, cleaning it up, and formatting it. Anyone else wanting to sell it, or give it away, should have to do the same, not swipe my work.

The Supreme Court and the Constitution disagree with you. The authoritative case on your 'sweat of the brow' argument is Feist v. Rural. Here's the good bits, rearranged and edited a bit for clarity:

[Some] courts developed a new theory to justify the protection of factual compilations. Known alternatively as "sweat of the brow" or "industrious collection," the underlying notion was that copyright was a reward for the hard work that went into compiling facts. The classic formulation of the doctrine appeared in Jeweler's Circular Publishing Co.:

"The right to copyright a book upon which one has expended labor in its preparation does not depend upon whether the materials which he has collected consist or not of matters which are publici juris, or whether such materials show literary skill or originality, either in thought or in language, or anything more than industrious collection. The man who goes through the streets of a town and puts down the names of each of the inhabitants, with their occupations and their street number acquires material of which he is the author.

The"sweat of the brow" doctrine had numerous flaws, the most glaring being that it extended copyright protection in a compilation beyond selection and arrangement - the compiler's original contributions - to the facts themselves. Under the doctrine, the only defense to infringement was independent creation. A subsequent compiler was "not entitled to take one word of information previously published," but rather had to "independently wor[k] out the matter for himself, so as to arrive at the same result from the same common sources of information." ...

Without a doubt, the "sweat of the brow" doctrine flouted basic copyright principles. ... "Sweat of the brow" courts ... handed out proprietary interests in facts and declared that authors are absolutely precluded from saving time and effort by relying upon the facts contained in prior works. In truth, "[i]t is just such wasted effort that the proscription against the copyright of ideas and facts . . . [is] designed to prevent." "Protection for the fruits of such research . . . may, in certain circumstances, be available under a theory of unfair competition. But to accord copyright protection on this basis alone distorts basic copyright principles in that it creates a monopoly in public domain materials without the necessary justification of protecting and encouraging the creation of `writings' by `authors.'" ...

The sine qua non of copyright is originality. To qualify for copyright protection, a work must be original to the author. Original, as the term is used in copyright, means only that the work was independently created by the author (as opposed to copied from other works), and that it possesses at least some minimal degree of creativity. To be sure, the requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice. The vast majority of works make the grade quite easily, as they possess some creative spark, "no matter how crude, humble or obvious" it might be. Originality does not signify novelty; a work may be original even though it closely resembles other works, so long as the similarity is fortuitous, not the result of copying. To illustrate, assume that two poets, each ignorant of the other, compose identical poems. Neither work is novel, yet both are original and, hence, copyrightable.

Originality is a constitutional requirement. The source of Congress' power to enact copyright laws is Article I, 8, cl. 8, of the Constitution, which authorizes Congress to "secur[e] for limited Times to Authors . . . the exclusive Right to their respective Writings." In two decisions from the late 19th Century - The Trade-Mark Cases, and Burrow-

At least they should be required to say WHY

I frequently use the ProQuest databases of newspaper story images, available courtesy of my public library. These are digitized page images. Those for The New York Times go cover 1851 to 2003; those for the Boston Globe, 1872 - 1923.

All of these, without exception, bear the notice "Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission."

In the case of articles published before 1923 (and don't you think it's interesting that the Globe cuts off at exactly 1923?) I completely fail to see how these can be anything other than a faithful reproduction of a work published in the United States before 1923.

Darn it, at the very least, if someone is going to claim copyright in something, they should be required to give an explicit statement of the legal basis for their claim. Maybe there's some way this material is copyrighted, but in the case of material that every university library guideline says is in the public domain, the burden of proof... or at least, the burden of saying why this is an exception to the general rule... should fall on the person making the assertion.

Sometimes not fraud, but sheer ignorance...

I sell out of print books on eBay. There is a certain historic African-American sorority that published a quite hard to find history of the organization -- tends to bring triple-digit prices when you can find a copy. I've been fortunate enough to twice have found a copy (once at an estate sale, once in a Goodwill), and both times when it was listed on eBay, I was INUNDATED with hostile messages from members of that sorority. Apparently, they believe that the fact that the book is copyrighted means that only THEY can sell copies, and only to fellow members -- as far as they are concerned, I don't have the right to read it or even posess it, let alone sell it! Both times, they lodged complaints with eBay who politely explained to them the right of resale and the fact that pretty much every used book sold, whether on eBay or in your local book nook, is copyrighted. But that didn't stop them from continuing to harass me and threaten me with legal action (take yer best shot, I told 'em). Really makes one wonder what sort of deep, dark secrets are in that book that they don't want any "outsiders" to get their hands on a copy!

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Really makes one wonder what sort of deep, dark secrets are in that book that they don't want any "outsiders" to get their hands on a copy!

I'd like to hear more details.

"The women of Delta Sigma Theta, a repected African-American women's organization, share more than 250 delicious recipes, compiled from members of the sorority, along with suggested menus and entertaining tips for specific occasions, ranging from bridal

Re:All over the place.

Remember when the Bush Camp tried to shut down Jib Jab over the copyright of "This land is my land?"

Slashdot would be a better place is people could leave their partisanship on the side and just present facts, not their dreams.

JibJab was sued by The Richmond Organization, which owns Ludlow Music, and was asserting its copyright claim.
As much as I hate to cite Wikipedia:

Richmond Organization threaten[ed] legal action. At this point, it was noticed that the copyright to the original 1945 publication had expired in 1973 and was not renewed as then required by copyright law. The Richmond Organization settled with Jibjab shortly thereafter. It still, however, claims copyright on other versions of the song, such as those appearing in the 1956 and later publications. Legally, such claims only apply to original elements of the song that were not in the public domain version.

So, no, it wasn't the "Bush Camp" that tried to get the song pulled. And those who can remember the parody without the tinted glasses of partisanship remember that it poked fun at both Republicans and Democrats equally well. But somehow you don't see Republicans claiming the "Kerry Camp" tried to get it silenced. I wonder why that is...

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Bush Camp

Let's put this one to the test.
Here a news article link the the JibJab affair: http://money.cnn.com/2004/07/26/commentary/wastler /wastler/ [cnn.com]
Here is some more information on The Richmond Organization: http://www.mpa.org/directories/music_publish [mpa.org]

Re:All over the place.

Give the man a break. So much is the fault of Bush & Co. that if you don't know what you're talking about, you can guess it was them and be correct more often than not.

That's exactly the kind of thing terrorists would do. After all... terrorists have done so many bad things that, if you don't know what's really going on, you can guess it was them and be correct more often than not.

Broken thinking makes good comedy - but not so good politics.

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Remember when the Bush Camp tried to shut down Jib Jab over the copyright of "This land is my land?"

I think you're thinking of the Scientologists.

</sarcasm>

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Making a false claim under the DMCA is PERJURY. It's a criminal offense.

The DMCA is a good law with poisonous rider provisions (stuff about circumvention devices for example), and of course like any law with good intentions, is being gamed and rigged by t

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The DMCA is a good law with poisonous rider provisions (stuff about circumvention devices for example)

Rider provisions are part of the law! You wouldn't say a cherry-and-strychnine pie was a "good pie with poisonous ingredients", would you?

Re:All over the place.

Making a false claim under the DMCA is PERJURY. It's a criminal offense.

Wake me up the first time someone is convicted of perjury for making a false DMCA claim. Its not real until the prosecutors, well, prosecute it.

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I want to see, in the words of FTC Commissioner Orson Swindle (great name!), "a few public hangings" for bogus DMCA takedowns.

I think part of the problem is that the organization issuing the takedowns might actually think they own them, because they own

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Try selling your own prints of images copied from the Getty digital archives
- Ok in the interest of following the call for "public hangings" in the GGP: If I make prints from my own source, but Getty Digital Archives believes that it is theirs and they

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s/sediment/sentiment/

Damn, and here I was thinking that the poster was attempting to evoke an image of people wading through the sludge of the legal system.

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The *recording* can be claimed under copyright law. For instance, you can freely record your own version of "The House of the Rising Sun" and distribute it however you care. But you can't do that with the recording of that song made by The Animals. While t

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The new song is a unique work. If I make a new arrangement for an old Beethoven or Mozart piece I own the copyright of that arrangement. So while the original is in the public domain my new arrangement is not.