2009/6/25 Jimmy Xu <xu.jimmy....@gmail.com>: > And here is the issue that in Berne Convention Article 2 (8), it says > "The protection of this Convention shall not apply to news of the day > or to miscellaneous facts having the character of mere items of press > information." So whether these kind of stuffs can be used as if they > were in public domain? Or some other steps has to be taken.
Here's my interpretation of this: there are two sides to copyright, the "concept" and the expression - the idea, and the way you write it. If you've written a novel, you have both kinds of copyright. I can't tell the same story by changing all the words without infringing - the idea is still the same. If you're just writing about simple factual information, however, then you don't have copyright in the underlying facts - but you still have copyright in the way you write about them. So, a newspaper can't claim copyright on the "concept" of one of its stories - I can't copyright the idea of writing stories about an election! - but the actual text of them is still copyrighted, so we can't simply reprint copies of it as though it were public domain. > Additionally, if so, that means for a news, the "five Ws" are not > eligible but the comment by the author is eligible for copyright. Am I > right? Thanks. I'd extend "comment" to be "the words they've actually written", but that's about it. They can't stop you paraphrasing or rewriting it. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l