Theos-Talk Archives (July 2001 Message tt00147)

At 09:11 PM 7/16/01 -0400, Bart Lidofsky wrote:
> Frank Reitemeyer wrote:
> >
> > << The following might be of interest to theosophical authors.
> > If the book was written and published a few years back, the
> > publisher may not have electronic rights to the book. This
> > might mean that many authors could put their books on the
> > Internet and distribute them in ebook form, if they wish,
> > without needing advance permission from the publishers.
> > >>
> >
> > Would be interesting to know whether this is a US law only or does that 
> also
> > count for Europe?
>
> It is a court decision that is being appealed.
>
> Bart Lidofsky
I do not think the court decision could be appealed since it is a decision 
by the US Supreme Court. Here is a msg from copyright maillist.

mkr

[PS: I have been following the copyright issues since the time when a well 
known member of TS tried to mislead me in a copyright matter couple of 
years ago relative to the quoting unpublished material.]

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Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 11:55:21 -0700
Reply-To: cni-copyright@cni.org
Sender: owner-cni-copyright@cni.org
Precedence: bulk
From: "Tyler Ochoa" <tochoa@law.whittier.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list <cni-copyright@cni.org>
Subject: New York Times Co. v. Tasini

The U.S. Supreme Court held 7-2 that inclusion of individual articles from 
a periodical in an electronic database is not a "revision" of the 
periodical within the meaning of Section 201(c) of the Copyright Act. The 
court did not distinguish between text-based and image-based databases; it 
found that the capability of searching the database for individual articles 
rendered both types of databases not a "revision." The opinion is available at:
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/00slipopinion.html

I would have taken a position between the majority and the dissent. I am 
persuaded by the majority's reasoning with regard to text-based databases, 
but I would have held that image-based databases that reproduced the entire 
page on which an article appeared, along with all other pages from the same 
periodical, qualified for the revision privilege. I don't think that the 
electronic search capability alone should make a difference; in my view 
that is simply a faster version of a very good indexing system.
Tyler T. Ochoa
Associate Professor
Whittier Law School