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Dead Sea Scrolls Copyrighted?
Dr Caleb writes: "We all know that no copyright has expired since the beginning of the 1900's, but what about 3000 B.C. ? 'It's like copyrighting scientific truth, like Einstein copyrighting 'e equals mc2,' Hausner said. 'These ancient texts are part of the scientific knowledge.' Apparently Elisha Qimron from Ben Gurion University puzzled together the bits and pieces of the scrolls, and has won copyright because he managed to infer the 40% that was missing."
Qimron's copyright is only for the 40% he inferred. That's a no-brainer, isn't it?
An excerpt from the article:
Judge Yaakov Tirkel, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel, agreed that Qimron could not claim copyright on the scroll fragments, nor on those fragments that were pieced together by physical resemblance.
However, the deduction of the 40 percent of the text that was missing emerged from Qimron's "creative depths," Tirkel said, and the scholar was therefore was entitled to the copyright.
Therefore, Hausner's assertion that the scrolls are 'part of the scientific knowledge' is moot, because the scrolls are not covered under the copyright. Furthermore, his comparison with Einstein's not having copyrighted his theories does nothing to support his case. Einstein would have had just as much right to copyright his papers as any other author. Don't get me wrong, I don't think he should have, and I'm glad he didn't, but what reasonable person would argue that he didn't have the right to do so?
Oh, while I'm ranting, what does 3000 B.C. have to do with anything?
The Dead Sea Scrolls are believed to have been written around the time of Jesus, not 3000 years before his birth.
Browser? I barely know her!
I think the title of this article is (somewhat) misleading. From reading the linked story it appears that the researcher only has copyright on certain deductions he made about the scrolls, and perhaps his translation. Well, duh! I don't have copyright on Homer's Iliad but if I write a scientific paper regarding the Iliad I have copyright on what I wrote. I don't see how this is any different.
The knowledge contained on the Scrolls, or any other ancient text, should be considered in the public domain. Sure, the Israeli gov't may choose to restrict access to the physical scrolls, but I suppose that's their perogative. (Maybe they worry about the fragments being physically damaged.) However, if the only access the outside world is given is through this one man's research, which he has copyright over, I don't think that's right. What about peer review? What happens if he's biased, or just wrong? If what this story is saying (and I believe it is) is that this guy has copyrighted the only authorized translation, the only thing that other researchers can work from, then that's a problem.
The scientist regrets the information being so open now. Aww, too bad. He can't keep it all to himself. Well, tough. I guess just as some businessmen are greedy for money, some scientists are greedy for knowledge and would like to deny anybody else a chance in order to aggrandize themselves. What happened to the idea of sharing information so that the common pool of knowledge could be increased by having more people work on the problem?
Constitutionally Correct
This seems a little odd but the way I thought of it is this. If I spend years upon years of hard study and research of an ancient language and translate it for everybody to read, then I should hold the copyright to my translation. It is my work after all, and if others wish to make their own translation of it, there is nothing to stop them. Simply simply copying and pasting my texts into a book and then selling it for profit is pirating my research. The scientists who are making all the fuss DID not even ask for permission to use the text. That would tic me off a little bit as well.
Sig it.
But Einstein's papers were copyrighted to him the moment he wrote them. Anything you create is automatically copyrighted to you.
-thomas
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"And like that
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Now if the autor of the scrolls had so much insight why didn't he foresee to ad something like this to the bottom of each page?
-- New findging: Early paste eaters 42% less likely to divorce.
From the horse's mouth: The copyright in the work of authorship immediately becomes the property of the author who created the work.
The operative word there is created.
Writing down someone else's findings is reproduction, not creation.
If you mail yourself copyrighted material (music recording, words on paper, or whatever), you're proving when it was created, providing you don't open the envelope. The postmark shows the date you mailed it, and since you couldn't mail it before you created it, you must have created it before the date on the postmark. That way, if you have to go to court to defend your copyright, you have a document from the Federal Government that shows when you authored the work, presumably before somebody ripped you off.
Sounds sketchy, but it's cheaper than a lawyer.
Browser? I barely know her!
Although overjoyed that the case was over -- Eisenman's lawyer said an appeal was unlikely -- Qimron said he has regrets about the access others now have to the scrolls. He said it robbed scholars such as himself of the leisurely pace they once enjoyed. "Now there are a lot of people, and they work in haste to beat each other to publication," he said. "That's not proper."
Although IANAResearcher or Doctorate student or anything, I can sympathize with mr. Qimron's (wow, he even has a Trekkie-ish name) point. These days, there's a lot of money invested in grants, patents, scholarships and the like, and therefore there's a "first to publish, first to get the goods" attitude in several scientific circles.
Although I sincerely hope mr. Qimron is not doing this for the money, I can see why he would think that a copyright on his works could work towards doing research at a slower pace, and doing it "by the book" instead of cutting corners in order to be first, and not doing enough background research... no, wait, that's Slashdot submissions. Sorry.
Nah, I'm just kidding, but you get my point. If there's something worse than "First Post!" comments in Slashdost, I think it would be "First Article!" submissions to more serious science publications.
On the other hand, if it's all for the monetary gain, we could always start an Open Scrolls Movement. Anyone'd like to try and develop DeDSS?
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
Alright, time to throw in my $.02 worth...
Publishing in academia is a bit of a nasty area, to be honest. I'm a PhD candidate, and this is what I have observed about publishing in my field (mostly artificial neural networks, with a little bit of software engineering).
In academia, it is very much "publish or perish". One of the first things other researchers will ask you when discussing your future is "how many publications do you have?". Full time academic staff have to maintain a certain level of publishing quality and quantity to retain their tenure, and research grants are also strongly influenced by the publishing record of the applicants.
Unfortunately, this can lead to some abuses of the publishing system. I have heard of people being bullied into putting a supervisor's name onto a paper, even though the supervisor didn't contribute anything to the paper. Stories also circulate about reviewers that reject papers, then publish the same material as their own work. Then there are the papers that are simply fraudulent, making claims that cannot be substantiated or are simply bogus.
From my own experience of publishing, I can say that copyright of a paper rests in the first instance with the authors. When the paper is published, copyright is usually transferred to the publishers (I recently sent off a copyright transfer form for a conference paper).
In the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the copyright was only awarded for the 40% the Israeli researcher inferred, not the rest of the information in the scrolls. Furthermore, the American editors used a paper without the author's permission, including it into their own work without informing the author. In my opinion, this is almost as bad an abuse as the examples I cited above. I his position, I would be after their blood too.
Having used both the poor-man's copyright and the real copyright I can attest to the fact that it's really not that expensive, but it is irritating. Don't send your only copy, for sure. The idiots lost my first check for $20 and I had to send them another, which held up the process for quite awhile, but I finally got it. The total cost in money was about $30, which is cheaper than twenty minutes with a lawyer, and probably cheaper than a secure storage facility. And I don't have to make any monthly or yearly payments. The cost in irritation was minor.
Of course, no publisher ever bit, but that's another story. Presumably, you can go to the Library of Congress and look up a title called The Worldwrights by yours truly and it will be there.
I have heard that the easiest way to acutally have a legal copyright is to put the documents in an envelope and mail them to yourself. Go figure.
Actually I remember reading somewhere (and I wish I could remember where it was) that this doesn't really hold up in court. Too easy to fake. You could just send a non-sealed envelope through the mail and then seal a document in it later and then try and claim copyright over something that might not be yours. It's not that hard to copyright something anyway, and as someone else here pointed out, not that expensive.
Similarly the bible is public domain.
The sources may be lost but u can do waht u want with your own copy.