Subject: Re: Letters FROM Salinger being collected?
From: Tim O'Connor (oconnort@nyu.edu)
Date: Wed Aug 01 2001 - 18:31:48 GMT
On Wed, Aug 01, 2001 at 12:16:34PM -0500, Chris Kubica @Home wrote:
> It's my understanding that anything anyone has written is copyrighted
> the moment it is committed to paper (except a grocery list or something).
> This is how the copyright laws were changed in the USA, to help better
> protect authors, in the late 1970's I believe. This, in addition to
> what you pointed out: that ole JDS actually set a legal precedent at
> the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled that an author owns the *words*
> of a letter, no matter who owns the physical paper of the letter itself.
I haven't read this entire thread yet, having been pushed by an
emergency into something else non-electronic today, but I can
interpolate a few comments quickly.
Chris is partly right; once something is committed to fixed format
(e.g., fixed on paper by a writer), that work is automatically
copyrighted without further action, though further action is strongly
encouraged to protect your work.
In a perverse twist to copyright laws, if you NEVER publish that work
but copyright it and send a copy of it to the Library of Congress,
and you are an American citizen, the Library is legally obliged to add
the copy to its permanent collection (which, bizarrely, it is NOT
required to do when the work is published commercially ... which is why
so much published work is discarded by LC. (If you don't believe me,
see Nicholson Baker's DOUBLE FOLD, the shocking exposé on the library
industry.) (Specifically, see page 102 of DOUBLE FOLD: "the only
items that the library [of Congress] is required by law to store
in perpetuity, oddly enough, are unpublished but formally copyrighted
manuscripts. Anything published they can discard at any time." It is
a damning book in many ways, one that should be read by anyone who
loves books and who cares about their preservation.) That way, the
unpublished book gains the protections one imagines that are afforded
-- but are not -- to published books, and at much lower cost!
Also, as far as I understand it, the ruling that "the author owns the
words but a third party can own the paper on which the words appear
on" didn't get ruled on by the Supremes in the matter of Salinger;
remember, the Supremes declined to accept for review the Salinger case
at all, and simply let stand the lower court ruling. But that was an
issue of whether a researcher (Hamilton) could use unpublished work as
fair use if the author of that work argues that the use of said words
would detract from their market value. As far as I know, the law Chris
imagines originates with JDS actually has an older beginning in case
law, but unfortunately, I am nowhere near any of the books I have that
would help me out on this point, and I don't feel like slopping through
all the detritus that is on the Internet in order to find pointers to
case law that might help. Now, there's a small chance I'm wrong on
this last point, about when it was determined Who Owns The Paper -- and
it doesn't matter to me one way or the other, I'll admit -- but it is
true that the Supremes refused to grant Random House's request for
certiori when it petitioned the Court to overturn the higher court to
overturn the lower court's rulings, and the Supreme Court thereby let
the lower ruling stand, affirming the lower law as ruling law. But that
was mostly an issue of the fair use of an author's work and the use of
it under fair use, affecting its market value. I don't think (but
again, I could be wrong) it was about Who Owns The Paper The Words
Appear On.
Ironically, two points: Many of the words were quoted extensively in
news articles, thereby quoting what Hamilton himself was enjoined
from quoting. And second, we know that Salinger would never publish a
"Collected Letters of..." his work, so there's no way anything could
detract from their market value because he would never sell them. And
in the unthinkable situation that he SHOULD decide to publish them,
does ANY SANE PERSON really think a reader would decline to buy the
Salinger original because Hamilton quoted a tiny portion of the
letters? How insane!
All this case did was line the pockets of lawyers with Random House
cash, and establish some new laws about fair use that involved a writer
whom you could never argue into reasonable positions on matters of
fair use, no matter what!
So, it didn't establish much, practically or philosophically or in any
other way.
--tim
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