Pondering copyright laws; questions for lawyer types

[elfwreck]

In Which Elf Considers The Legality Of Litigation-Related Intimidation, or, is it legal to say "I'll sue you," even if there's no grounds for a lawsuit?

I've recently signed up at Wowio, which allows free download of three ebooks per day (and a queue of up to 500, so you can pick the ones you like to download later, and adjust the order you want

Comments

[crazykimmy]

Brock is right above. It's totally legal to copyright the form of something. This is what is actually copywritten in most compilations--the actual presentation of the material. Basically the content is freely available, and should you want to share it, you can simple find one of those copies--the original in the public domain--and run with that if you need to share it.

This is an area of IP law that gets sketchy--most pattern writers/recipe makers claim copyright on their material. They more frequently hold it on the presentation of the material and not the matter of it. Why? To prevent people from stifling the free flow of information by copyrighting simple repeateable things and preventing other legitimate usages of it. Truth be told, if someone actually could copyright a specific stitch pattern rather than the method of notating it, there'd be a lot less knitting books published. But it's a sketchy area of law, as he's noted, you can make a claim that the only course to challenge it would be court.

[elfwreck]

I know it's legal to copyright the form. The question is whether it's legal to imply that the text is copyrighted as well. (Which I'm not directly claiming is done here, but suspecting that it might be--that many publishers of public domain works, perfectly aware that only the format is copyrightable, nevertheless deliberately use phrasing the same as that which is used for original material, to imply that the text as well as the format is copyrighted.)

The claim, "no part of this ebook may be reproduced in any form without written permission" is false. The *content* can be copied at will--the strings of words are in the public domain--and those are certainly part of the ebook.

Is it legal to claim a right they don't have? Would it be legal for me, for example, to put a "No Parking" sign in front of my house--and remove it just before my husband gets home? (Or not remove it, 'cos he knows there's no police enforcing a no-parking zone here?)

[crazykimmy]

If you know IP Law, then you know that's not what they're claiming. It's perfectly reasonable to say that about their ebook: if you are copying over their formatting, you're violating their copyright. You acknowledged yourself that they've prettied it up; they have every legal right to protect that in the work. The language that accompanies their publication is standard and meets the criteria of the Act of 1976. There is nothing really remiss in their usage of it.

Because I deal with this type of copyright issue all the time, I can say with assurance that there is nothing illegal about their claim. Nor would anyone in IP Law or publishing look askance at it. Court decisions/goverment documents are public domain unless I am procuring them from a publisher like Thompson West that holds copyright over their formatting. I can tell you, certain publishers will assert their rights, like Westlaw. You just have to deal with the rights issue, or look for public domain sources elsewhere.

[elfwreck]

If you know IP Law, then you know that's not what they're claiming.

For years, tobacco companies claimed they were being honest about the risks of their products, and that they hadn't tried to mislead anyone about the dangers; they were, like alcohol companies, offering a substance that was subject to occasional misuse. Later, it was found they had attempted to cover up the dangers, to deceive people about the real risks.

Publishers are free to claim their copyrights. (However, even if they'd written the contents themselves, the statement is false: I don't need their permission to quote for review, or to write a parody of it.)

But they're not free to claim more rights than they have. Not free to restrict other people's free speech by threatening them with lawsuits they can't possibly prosecute. I'm pondering whether they are doing this, and what it would take to prove it if they were

[alixtii]

Hail Eris; I will have to start adding random legal statements to my works occasionally. Like "It is a crime to urinate on this letter in public" and "if you tear this flyer into pieces, you will be guilty of littering" and "burying this postcard with a backhoe is forbidden by law."

I strongly approve of this plan.