Copyright (was PDFs and tapeworm descriptions)

[Susan B. Farmer]

>
>But there is another aspect that one need to worry about now. That is The
>DIGITAL Millennium Copyright Act which is quite different from your standard
>copyright law and applies to anything is "digital" format. So, as your WWW
>site declares "In fact, the frightening reality is that almost everything on
>the Net is protected by copyright law."  Also, remember EU copyright law is
>different from US, and for us, the critical difference is that EU copyright
>protect "databases," so the Bibliotheque Nationale de France could protect
>their collection of pdf pages as a database.

That's true.  But you can't copyright non-original work (the PDFs).  You
can't copyright material that's already in the public domain (e.g., a list
of species, or marriage records).  You can't copyright a blank form.
In terms of genealogical works, you can only copyright the arrangement of
the material, so you probably could copyright the database structure.

>
>It should be noted that the old "fair use provisions" DO NOT apply to works
>in "digital" format. In fact, this is one of the basis of the legal
>challenges to DMCA that are now underway.

Yeah, my copyright information is from 1999 -- I'm looking into this one.

>
>Remember last Summer the FBI just went up on the podium and arrested a
>Russian scientist giving a paper at confernce because he had written some
>de-coding software which was used by OTHERs to de-code Adobe e-books. He
>spent a lot longer in the USA and in a different place than he had expected
>to be.
>
>Oh, what fun ...

sadly so.

Susan
-----
Susan Farmer
sfarmer at goldsword.com
Botany Department, University of Tennessee
http://www.goldsword.com/sfarmer/Trillium