O O Ø O O O O
Pirates of the Public Domain
Taking aim at the markup bandits.
If you’ve been following the action these last couple of weeks, you may have noticed a fair amount of fresh new content going up at the pd.o. No, the Pint Day Saints haven’t been feeling particlarly prolific of late. Rather, we’ve been borrowing from that all-important resource, the public domain, to do the creative bits for us.
You might remember the public domain as our half of the great compromise: We, the public, grant you, an author, a limited monopoly on the distribution and use of your work, so that you might have the chance to make a buck or two on it. Once a predetermined period is over, your work becomes part of the public domain, free for us to do with it what we please.
Well, free for all but claiming a new copyright on it. Once something is in the public domain, it is supposed to stay there.
Just because you can train the monkey doesn’t give you rights to his banana.
Traditional copyright law rewards authors of “creative” production with a copyright on their works. “Sweat-of-the-brow” efforts, such as compiling lists of names and phone numbers into alphabetically-sorted phone books have traditionally not been granted copyright protection.
Let me say that again: sweat-of-the-brow efforts have not been afforded copyright protection. Just because you can train the monkey doesn’t give you rights to his banana.
Why I bring this up is the following. Over the past week and a bit, we at the pd.o have been occupied—some might say obsessed—with marking up certain works from the public domain. The reasons for doing this are really twofold. First, we really wanted to read these works. Since they are mostly in the public domain, we thought that obtaining copies of them should be easier than it actually proved to be. Second, we wanted our copies of these texts to look good, and read easily. Like a good little geek, I do a lot of my reading on a Palm Pilot1. As you can probably imagine, footnotes, glossaries, and other such niceties are largely useless on these platforms without some navigation capability. Hence HTML, and in particular, XHTML 1.1 is my ebook format of choice.
Quite often, works that have fallen into the public domain—if they are available in electronic form at all—are available only in plain text (ASCII) format. Project Gutenberg, one of the main providers of public domain etexts even prides itself on this fact. Though there are some definite advantages to this stance—universality and staying power are two of the main ones—there are also some fairly seriously shortcomings. It is these shortcomings that lead some of us crazy folks to take the next logical step: adding markup.
I may as well run the Internet through the Swedish Chef filter, and claim to be the most prolific author on the planet.
As it turns out, the pd.o is not the only set of crazy individuals willing to sit down and mark up text-based works that have fallen into the public domain. We are, however, just about the only ones who do not claim any kind of copyright on the fruits of our markup labours.
And why would we? Having personally spent much of my free time in the last couple of weeks doing exactly this type of markup, I am in a pretty good position to state that this is precisely the kind of sweat-of-the-brow labour that should be excluded from copyright.
Markup, especially when applied to a body of extant prose is not a creative exercise. Having changed the little inch marks ("") to curly quotes (“”), and the double-hyphens (--) to em-dashes (—), I have added no creative value to the work whatsoever. Sure, there is some freedom in using symbolic vs. numeric entities. And yes, sometimes we may have to guess whether the transcriber’s use of uppercase was intended to mean italics, bold, or the original typsetter’s choice, but this is hardly creativity. It was a pile of effort (especially if you insist on doing it manually, like we have been here at the pd.o), but effort is not a copyrightable contribution. It is little more than adding page numbers, and don’t even get me started on that topic.
What makes these markup copyright claims even more infuriating is when you realize that—or worse, the authors brag about the fact that—automated scripts have done most of the work for them. That’s right, the authors’ creative contributions came from a piece of code, and yet they still have the audacity to claim a copyright on the result. I may as well run the Internet through the Swedish Chef filter, and claim to be the most prolific author on the planet.
... the scurvy dogs who are perpetrating this insanity are actively dissuading widespread dissemination of public domain works by introducing confusion into the arena.
This is piracy, plain and simple. It’s the pillaging of the public domain. And while sweat-of-the-brow activities like marking-up plain ASCII texts certainly add value to the public domain, they are not creative contributions. Worse, the scurvy dogs who are perpetrating this insanity are actively dissuading widespread dissemination of public domain works by introducing confusion into the arena.
“Oh, I know that the US Constitution is in the public domain, but I’m not sure if the markup on this HTML version I found is. I must now do my Internet research to clear the HTML, or re-do it all myself.”
Pirates, you’re coming by your source material freely. Your raw materials come from public domain, and yet you persist in claiming a copyright on your most minor of minor contributions. Why bother? Why pillage the public domain, replacing it with copyright-encumbered works?
Do us all a favour, and give something back. Sweat all you like, but leave your labours in the public domain so we can all make use of them.
Tuesday, June 17, 2003
PD DCIV
1 Sony Clié, actually. (Love that 320x320 screen).