The Best of The Worst Hollow Copyright Claims (medium.com)

tiltowait writes: Slashdot readers should be familiar with most if not all of these, but the list of 20 Hollow Copyright Claims is a somber reminder of the current sorry state of intellectual property laws in the United States--as anyone who's encountered a paywall or a takedown notice (or remembers Slashdot's run-in with Scientology) can attest. It serves as a call to arms that we not lose sight of the benefits to sharing knowledge.

Comments

Missed one

[PvtVoid]

One of the most disgusting recent copyright stunts was the Anne Frank Foundation extending the copyright on her diary by claiming Otto Frank as a co-author.

If anything ought to be considered owned by the world as a whole, it's Anne Frank's diary.

Re:The Worst Hollow Copyright Claim:

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an author, and I have no problem with this. In fact, I encourage it. Why should a generation find a means to profit off my work, changing it, manipulating it, doing whatever they want with it, soon after I pass? What a disgrace that could be. Have you seen how far removed these new Alice and Wonderland movies are? Gawd, completely off the point. Now people think of Lewis Carrol as an author and cartoonist, not the brilliant methmetician he was. There's also the drug/hippie flower-power relationship that was never intended.

Access to original

[Michael Woodhams]

This raises an interesting issue:
If I edit Anne Frank's diary, I have copyright on the edited version. If I carefully set things up and take a high quality photo of the Mona Lisa, I have copyright over that photo. If a monkey takes a selfie with my camera and then I do a bunch of post-processing to "improve" it and publish the improved picture, I have copyright due to the improvements.

In each case, somebody else could read the diaries and publish their own edition, take their own photo of the Mona Lisa, or freely distribute the original unimproved monkey selfie - but only if they have access to the diaries (or facsimile), to the Mona Lisa without plate glass in the way, or the unimproved selfie. When access to the original is restricted, reproductions can effectively exert copyright over the original when the original is out of copyright. (The monkey selfie camera owner missed this trick.)