

Copyfraud Is Stealing the Public Domain - FluidDjango
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/26/copyfraud/

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yangyang
Argh, too many levels of indirection.

The paper:
[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=787244#Pa...](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=787244#PaperDownload)

Article on The Register, referenced by the Slashdot post:
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/26/copyfraud/>

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tedunangst
Overblown. Amazon lets you sell public domain books. Big whoop.

The examples seem a little stretched too. I tried reading the original paper,
but it's quite dry and 75% footnotes, but one example was a school textbook
that reprints the constitution and claims copyright (over the whole work)
without explicitly uncopyrighting the public domain bits. That's explicitly
allowed. You can copyright arrangements and collections of public domain work,
to the extent that there is original work involved in the selection.

On the whole, the summary seems to be "some people tried to use public domain
work and other people complained but they shouldn't have."

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ubernostrum
"On the whole, the summary seems to be "some people tried to use public domain
work and other people complained but they shouldn't have.""

Not quite. The Google book search stuff, for example, is problematic:
digitizing a public-domain book, or printing a new copy and slapping a binding
on it, generally isn't sufficient to grant you a copyright in the resulting
work, since there is no original work involved in doing so. As a result,
publishers who claim copyright in public domain works after having done
nothing other than digitize or otherwise republish are making false claims
regarding the copyright status of those works.

I'd personally be interested to know whether the heirs of the original
rightsholder could -- even after copyright expires -- bring a suit for slander
of title over this sort of behavior.

