[Upd-discuss] be immortal

[Lars Aronsson]

Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:
> I was ready to think that they would pretend that even being a 
> public moral person, but that their creation would give birth to 
> author's rights. There are some cases and... why not. In such a 
> case, we would have used the older dictionnaries, the one 
> published for more than 70 years. I would have tried to argue 
> but it would have been legally complicated.

Big dictionaries, encyclopedias, newspapers and magazines are 
typically "works for hire", which means that the contributing 
authors are paid a salary once, either per hour or line of text, 
and do not receive any royalty payment if extra copies of the work 
are sold.  In such cases, you can safely assume that the 
(commercial) copyright expires when 70 years after the year of 
publication.

You should not ask permission or try to argue with the 
institution, but go ahead and digitize.  If the institution really 
thinks this is wrong, they should have the burden of going through 
the legal system (police and courts), and *there* they should try 
to present their strange ideas of "immortal authors", with the 
risk of appearing as ridiculous in the press.

If you -- against all odds -- are called to a (French) court of 
law after having digitized and made available a 70 year old French 
dictionary, your defence should make a reference to the January 
2005 article in Le Monde by Jean-Noel Jeanneney, and the following 
motion by President Chirac in the European Union.  You will be the 
French national hero, and the institution that called you to court 
will be condemnd by the President of the Republique.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
  Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/