Re: Conversion filters; intellecutal property

[Norman Bauman nbauman@xxxxxxxx]

There are 3 questions here: Is it legal? *Should* it be legal? Is it
ethical, if you can do it and get away with it?

At 03:58 PM 10/25/01 -0400, Leslie Bialler wrote:
>
>Norman Bauman wrote:
>
>"Let's change the hypothetical. Suppose there is no Nephew Max. Suppose
>Norman"
>
>Let me apologize for having used the name Norman in my example.

Oh, no, I thought that was funny. Law professors have done much worse to
their students in hypotheticals.

>Actually it is not nearly that bad. One need only make a "good faith
effort" to
>secure permission. This is a real example. Columbia University Press was
>publishing a book in which illustrations of old magazine covers were used.
While
>some of the illustrations were within the 95-year limits I mentioned in my
prior
>post, the magazines in some cases had gone out of business. The author made
>several attempts to contact somebody who might own the copyrights, but w/o
>success. We therefore published the illustrations anyway, duly cited the
original
>source, and placed a disclaimer on the copyright page that stated this
fact, and
>stated also that the Press and the author would be interested in hearing from
>anyone who claimed to own the copyrights in question.

>"This is the fourth letter I have sent requesting permission to quote . .
.. . As
>the law states I need only make a good faith effort to secure permission,
I can
>assume only that you have no objection to my printing this lyric and wish no
>payment." That got their attention.

That's a good paragraph. I may use it some day.

But I think the real question is, what about an entire work that is out of
print, where it is impossible to find the author or anyone representing the
author, including those cases where it is reasonable to assume the author
is dead? That comes up a lot.

Can you reprint an entire abandoned work, as Dover used to do when the
copyright laws had a shorter period and required renewal? It's probably a
violation of the copyright law. But *should* it be? I don't think it serves
any legitimate purpose to prevent people from copying abandoned works. And
XyWrite 3.55 could well turn into an abandoned work.

>Then Norman posits:
>
>"Suppose I wanted to rewrite XyDOS in Linux. Would there be anything wrong
>with that?
>
>If you had permission, nothing whatsoever.

I mean without permission. Actually, there is a line of "look and feel"
cases. I'm not sure how they all turned out. But I used AsEasyAs instead of
Lotus 123 for a long time, and they were pretty similar.

>"And besides, didn't XyQuest write the original software as a copy of the
>Atex system, in violation of the copyright laws which Atex retrospectively
>decided to overlook?"
>
>Tim Behr would be the guy to answer that one. My understanding was that Atex
>granted the permission freely, but perhaps not.

I don't know if Tim Behr would *want* to answer that. The story I read in a
lot of places was that XyWrite was written from Atex without permission.
After it was written, Atex let them distribute it.

If that's true, then it's one more example of how copyright law would have
retarded innovation if programmers had followed it. If they had followed
your advice, we might never have had XyWrite.

>and Norman writes In conclusion:
>
>> I say yea. That's why they have horse races. I don't think it's *unethical*
>> to copy an abandoned work. I think the laws should change to reflect that.
>
>Fortunately or unfortunately, this is not the way things are. I deal with
things
>as they are.

If you're dealing with the way things are, you have to acknowledge the fact
that people violate the intellectual property laws all the time with
impunity, and sometimes the results are good. XyWrite seems to be an example.


-------------------------------------------------------
Norman Bauman
411 W. 54 St. Apt. 2D
New York, NY 10019
(212) 977-3223
http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman
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