Re: Copyright: Form, Content, and Prepublication Incarnations

From: Joseph Pietro Riolo <riolo_at_VOICENET.COM>
Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2001 15:46:22 -0500

On Thu, 8 Nov 2001, Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_cogprints.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> There are two almost entirely independent dimensions of copyright
> protection:
>
> CT: Protection from theft-of-text (piracy, illicit acquisition or sale of
> the copyright owner's text)
>
> and
>
> CA: Protection from theft-of-authorship (plagiarism, the claim to
> having written the author's text).

In the U.S., copyright does not protect authors from plagiarism. I can
read an article written by another person, get all the ideas and facts
from the article, and write a new article using my own words to express
the same or similar ideas and facts without giving any credit to the
person. That is because ideas and facts are in the public domain and
no one can own them exclusively. Section 106A in the U.S. Copyright Law
allows only the authors of the works of the visual art such as artists
to claim the authorship only for their works. But, they cannot claim
authorship over the uncopyrightable items in their works and copyrightable
items that are independently created by other people in their works.

That is where we differ.

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<riolo_at_voicenet.com>

Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this
post in the public domain.
Received on Thu Nov 08 2001 - 21:12:45 GMT