[Upd-discuss] copyrighting out of copyright properties

[Greg Newby]

On Fri, Nov 25, 2005 at 11:22:23PM -0500, Richard M. Stallman wrote:
>     I have the idea the above scenario is possible under current copyright 
>     law.  Is t his correct?  And if it is, is it a viable solution to assume 
>     a sort of copyright on my digitized versions of the songs, and make them 
>     available via a Creative Commons "share music"  licence?
> 
> There's nothing wrong with the that particular license, as regards its
> terms.  But I would not use it with the "Creative Commons" label.
> People tend to treat everything labeled "Creative Commons" as a unit,
> so that using one of their licenses has the inevitable side-effect of
> promoting everything Creative Commons does.
> 
> That now includes certain licenses which do not permit people in the
> US and Europe even to share verbatim copies.  (Specifically are the
> Developing Nations licenses and at least some of the Sampling
> licenses.)  When I found out about this, I decided I should not
> support Creative Commons any longer.

(Not responding to that part)

> I am not a lawyer, so I will leave to others with more knowledge the
> question whether the cleaned-up versions will be copyrightable or what
> that might actually cover.

Responding to this part: Project Gutenberg has a policy on this.  It's
been vetted/approved by several lawyers, including those specializing in
copyright.  While is has not been tested in court, we use it regularly
for acquiring public domain items which have had some "sweat of the
brow" applied.  For example, we've used it as a basis for gathering page
images from various book-scanning projects (Google's, Yahoo's, Gallica's
and many others) for creating Project Gutenberg eBooks.


Here it is:


PROJECT GUTENBERG'S POSITION ON "SWEAT OF THE BROW" COPYRIGHT CLAIMS

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Most recently updated April 6, 2004