Theos-Talk Archives (August 2001 Message tt00004)

The issue of copyright relative to material which is not published -
either in print or in any electronic media, including Internet based
e-mail - comes up from time to time.

Several months ago, I was in a controversy dealing with the copyright
limits of unpublished material. The author, a person well-known in
theosophical circles, asserted (erroneously - whether deliberate or not,
I do not know) that no one has any right to disclose any of the the
content of any unpublished material; and this I thought was a
super-clever application of copyright laws to prevent diclosure of info
that may make some one or some organization or both not look good. So I
went to research the matter.

The research was very revealing. Years ago, someone got hold of some
unpublished material written by the famous provocative writer J. D.
Salinger. When some of the material - as I reall - was quoted and
appeared in print media, there was a litigation which went all the way
to U.S. Supreme Court and it was held that as per the then existing
Copyright law, the disclosure and quoting was totally prohibited.

The decision was far reaching as far as the newsmedia is concerned. Most
of the time newsmedia gets much of their investigatory journalism
material from unpublished and confidential material and hence would
prevent such material even from disclosure or quoting. So the work of
newsmedia would be severely hampered.

So Senate and Congress recognized the problem and went to work to fix
this problem and the copyright law was amended. Under the amendment, the
fair use concept of quoting and disclosure of unpublished material is ok
and does not violate US Copyright laws and this is the current copyright
law.

As this may be of interest to some of the subscribers here, I thought I
should share this info.

mkr