

Copyrighting the English language - madboy
http://fhtr.blogspot.com/2009/08/eu-court-rules-11-word-snippets-can.html

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billswift
Also, copyright, unlike patents REQUIRES copying. A patent can infringe
accidentally, even if you didn't know the patent existed. With Copyright you
must have actually copied from a copyrighted work for your work to be
infringing.

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username
Is comparing the same as copying? Would it be copying if someone tells me
whether something I make is the same as their copy or not?

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baddox
But in doing so, you will violate so many copyrights that you'll forget about
all the new ones you acquired.

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Retric
You are not violating copyrights, because you are not copying other works.
However, as nobody would read that text, you can't really enforce copyright
because they did not derive their work from yours.

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pbhjpbhj
But, if you've published that work once, eg on the internet then you can re-
publish the same work when another party comes up with their own version
(AFAICT). So when AP publish their equivalent of your prior published phrase
you simply re-publish that identical excerpt - you've haven't copied from them
you've simply taken a timing queue.

You need a good date on your copy, I believe you are still allowed to register
a work with the US government, so that would do, or get someone like
archive.org to take a copy for you.

What could AP do?

You might also try for prominent publication of your word lists so that you
can argue that AP copied you based on them having the opportunity, but I don't
think you'd swing that one by a long shot.

This is absolutely not legal advice by any stretch of the imagination!

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baddox
How do you define "publish on the Internet" when it's terabytes and terabytes
of data? Just buy a domain and host the files from home for a minute, and
technically you've "published it on the Internet."

What I'm saying is, to register a work with the US government, you'd have to
filter out all the already-copyrighted 11 word combinations, which would be
virtually impossible. Without a distinction made between the already-
copyrighted sentences and your "original" ones, I don't think you could have a
copyright on the original ones.

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pbhjpbhj
No, you're not copying those short phrases from anyone else, you wouldn't need
to filter them out. This is establishing a point for yourself where any 5 word
phrase from now on can be published by you relying on your own publication as
a prior source.

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baddox
If your generation of the new phrases is considered to be a purposeful act
that you performed in order to obtain the copyrights for them, then the
generation of existing copyrighted phrases would also be a purposeful act, and
hence would be copyright infringement.

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gojomo
Haiku poems have been held to be copyrightable; at 17 syllables, they may be
11 words, or less.

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jacquesm
Someone should do a search of all haiku poems then and check to see which ones
coincidentially match up with 11 words that were written before the poems
release.

Personally I think if you want to copyright something you should keep it to
yourself. Don't poison the pool with the content that you own in order to
extract royalties from the rest of us. It's bound to leak through sooner or
later.

Let the criterium be that if you perform something in public or spread it _it
becomes public domain_ instantly.

This will upset lots of apple carts but I really think it is the only thing
that in the long term will make sense.

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pbhjpbhj
Gah, the internet ate my thoughtful response: PD doesn't protect your right to
be named as author, IMO that moral right should be protected as it is in the
Berne Convention.

Copyright [supposedly] ensures that works move into the public domain. The
problem with copyright is that the terms should be of the order of 15 years,
not life + 70.

Without copyright books would simply not be edited - editorial staff couldn't
be paid as on release an opposing publisher (lulu?) would simply grab the book
and publish an identical but lower cost copy. The first copy sold would have
to assume the costs of the entire production, authors, publishing staff,
printers, machinery.

Bands would probably still fill venues. But songwriters would be working for
free as they could never demo a piece without "spread[ing] it".

DRM and contract law would fill the void and IMO less pieces would ever
eventually enter the public domain and the arts would no longer provide most
of the careers it does now.

A painter may still sell pictures, but a photographer could only sell each one
once. Any advertiser could use your personal picture if you published it
online. Anybody could claim your programming library, not only for free, but
as their own if they could access the code in any way.

Copyright is not _all_ bad.

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jacquesm
Precious few of your examples would seem to me to be a 'loss' of something,
most of them would simply change the theater we're operating in.

Copyright is not all bad, but that is not the issue here. The issue is whether
the sum total of the effect of the existence of copyright is a good thing or a
bad thing.

My suspicion is that it is a net negative.

