Advanced Scientific and Technical Writing
Intellectual Property: Background and Notes
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April 1999 note: I've recently updated the Intellectual Property:
Copyright and Fair Use web page on the Computers in Composition site:
<http://www.coh.arizona.edu/comp/cic/intellectual.html>
The First U.S. Copyright Law: George Washington in The Columbian Centinel July 17, 1790 |
"Knowledge is, in every country, the surest basis of public happiness."
George Washington, to Congress, January 8, 1790 "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for
limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective
Writings and Discoveries ..."
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Trademarks on the Internet (and Example Trademark Devices)
- The Office of Trademarks & Licensing:
- Intel Secrets
- The Unofficial Brady Bunch Home Page
- The Holden Server
Department of Intercollegiate Athletics, University of Arizona
(and see http://www.teleport.com/~btucker/bbsorry.htm)
(and see Seemann's Fair Use argument to J.D. Salinger's representatives)
Legal and Legislative
- Digital
Millennium Copyright Act Summary
(requires Adobe Reader)
Copyright Law: Title
17 of the United States Code
§
107: Fair use
American
Geophysical Union V. Texaco Inc.
2nd Circuit Court narrows the definition
of "research purposes."
Online
Publisher Challenges Copyright Law
New York Times, January 15,
1999; includes links to Eldred v. Reno,
Copyright Extension Act of 1998,
and more ...
Crash Course in CopyrightAdvocacy
University of Texas; good resources on Fair Use, graphics and multimediaTimeline: A History of Copyright in the U.S.
Association of Research Libraries
- Negativland
The Electronic Frontier Foundation
The
Digital Future Coalition
Excellent historical and archival
source for Digital Millennium Copyright Act
| " ... Neither a Klein bottle nor a shovel made of silk
could be patented. It had to be a thing, and the thing had to work. Thus,
the rights of invention and authorship adhered to activities in the physical
world. One didn't get paid for ideas, but for the ability to deliver them
into reality. For all practical purposes, the value was in the conveyance
and not in the thought conveyed.
In other words, the bottle was protected, not the wine. Now, as information enters cyberspace, the native home of Mind, these bottles are vanishing. With the advent of digitization, it is now possible to replace all previous information storage forms with one metabottle: complex and highly liquid patterns of ones and zeros."
The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but `[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.' . . . To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work. . . . This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate. It is the means by which copyright advances the progress of science and art.
American 'content' industries (producers of movies, photographs and sound recordings) are lobbying to have the 'fair use' option removed. On the principle of 'fair use' researchers can at present take, for example, graphs, tables, illustrations or factual data from copyrighted sources, for the purpose of scholarly argument or exposition. If the threatened changes go through, a payment to the copyright-holder (i.e. the publisher, not the originator) will be levied.
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