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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
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.