Stevan Harnad wrote: > > Currently, copyright law is doing double duty, (1) protecting > copyright-holders from users who would make copies of their texts without > paying for them (give-away authors do not want this protection) and > (2) protecting copyright-holders from users who would make corrupted > copies of their texts (including copies in which someone else is listed > as the author). Almost all authors still want protection from the > latter. > > To this layman, therefore, it looks clear that PostGutenberg copyright > protection has to be split (into at least two parts). For non-giveaway > texts it must forbid (1) and (2), and for give-away texts it must forbid > (2) but not (1).
What on earth can it mean, protect the "textual integrity" of a work that is flexible, shared, and can be parsed? I don't get it. I can't. When it comes to authoritativeness, recourse to a reliable historical archive and a respect for an author's attestation regarding a work's integrity, are all that we can ever dream of relying on. Being able to "go to the source" will in fact be increasingly recognized as the essential value that we may accord to archives and the role of authors. If you want to say misattribution of modified works should be protected against, that makes sense. But "textual integrity?" Legal protection against "corrupted copies?" I won't go into the way this take on things easily allies with the notion of instituting universal forms of technological "content control." This is a question that can't simply be couched in terms of what the law says for public domain works versus other works to which we accord exclusive rights -- because the factual elements that make up a digital expressive work are, and can only be, fair game. Misattribution is as far as you can go. The author of a work is the sole agent, aside from a reliable historical archive, who can attest to the integrity of a work. Making hay out of "corruption" of a digital work for legal purposes isn't actually constructive, while recognizing the nature of digitized works only makes the author's authentic role important: attesting to original textuality. Seth Johnson -- [CC] Counter-copyright: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/cc/cc.html I reserve no rights restricting copying, modification or distribution of this incidentally recorded communication. Original authorship should be attributed reasonably, but only so far as such an expectation might hold for usual practice in ordinary social discourse to which one holds no claim of exclusive rights.