Discussion Groups / British English / April 2007

Speech (or music, for that matter) is copyrighted as soon as it is "fixed".
So someone surreptitiously recording your conversation has inadvertently
copyrighted it for you.  American and European copyright diverges over the
question of whether a separate copyright subsists in, say, a newspaper
report of a political speech.

That would be because they wish to appropriate the copyright for themselves
(with or without payment).  Again, there is a divergence in American and
European copyright law over the existence of a separate copyright in the
typographical arrangement of a printed work (that copyright would
automatically belong to the publisher - unless the author has done the
typesetting, of course.)

What makes it even more irksome is it seems to have
happened again with a follow-up I made to this post. On
early indications anyway. As it's also happened with one
further down the thread I shall have to wait and see but
as the "object" post hasn't turned up at all and it's been
a few days now I suspect some sad creep is playing the
old cyberstalking games.

G DAEB

COPYRIGHT (C) 2007 SIPSTON
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I don't believe this. I have now tried 4 times
to follow-up to this post and none of them
has done anything but disappear off in to
some kind of cybervoid.

Years I've been using this news gateway
and nothing like this has ever happened
before. Which suggests it is something
malicious, and targetted, in this instance.

It was taken as such. Making a copyright declaration
does indeed seem to be the USENET equivalent of
wearing shorts. But it was taken as such in the wider
context of you decided to play a game of "oh what did
you mean by *that* word then?"

I'd thought you were a bit older than that from the
general tone of your posts.

No, not really. As someone who can type as well as
write I try to post articles rather than waste all the
bandwidth that the often unseen but nonetheless ever
present verbose headers take up and all the reproduced
text that leads to nothing more than a glib, and often
not particularly clever let alone original, one-liner.

Some people's lengthier articles I read. Some I don't.
It tends not to matter so much whether I agree with
them or not as whether or not they can write with an
engaging well-paced style and proffer a reasonably
structured argument.

Your comments seem to apply for USENET generally,
yes, but in this instance it seems more the equivalent
of a televised debate than conversation as such.

Actually, with your comments below about publishers
claiming copyright, any edition of Question Time or
even Trisha is copyright--yet they are indeed "talk".

So, assuming they shoot 3 or 4 shows in a day, then
someone's doing 6 impossible things before sign-off.

It is unneccessry also to adopt any of the conventions
of Standard English, such as grammar or, indeed, even
spelling.

Grammar in the form of apostrophes, commas and
other clause delimiters, full stops &c. can generally
be inferred. Not to mention that very few paragraphs
are ever more than a few sentences long, whether
one is talking about USENET posts, newspaper articles
or teletext systems. Literature in the form of novels and
also academic works may be exceptions to this.

Spelling, as has been demonstrated by researchers
from Oxford University, is largely redundant provided
you get the first and last letters in place and make
sure indicative vowels and consonants lie between
them.

The pros and cons of this are somewhat debatable
as it assumes that the only people we ever write
for are both accomplished readers already--and I
have no problem with my writings being used in
adult literacy programmes, regardless whether
or not people agree with me. Not only that but
when you consider disability issues there is the
issue of to what extent on-line dicussion forums
such as these are a lifeline for blind and partially-
sighted people who rely on text-to-speech software
applications, which the Oxford bods didn't mention
as being able to handle such constructions.

Still, it's not actually necessary where most people
are concerned to follow the conventions of Standard
English. Yet you do. And most people don't.

Similarly, whilst the folk-logic that copyright has no
meaning on USENET applies and keeps being
regurgitated mindlessly, then those of us who write
at our leisure are perhaps being inconsiderate and
discourteous to those who may be tempted to use
our work for academic purposes such as copying
it into an essay because it's too much effort to
write their own paraphrase.

Whether or not this is linked to the fact that it's an
unusual student these days who doesn't hand essays
in that have been computer composed and printed
out yet this kind of literacy - being able to type - is
largely something left to the individual to learn is a
different matter.

There is the fact that DVORAK layouts are held to
be both easier to use once learnt and also associated
with a lower incidence of RSI/CTS than QWERTY
keyboards, yet they are hardly ubiquitous. Whilst
this shouldn't pose too much problem for people
using IBM-clones, it would be the death knell for
Apple in the hardware arena. Yet I can quite see
why it is that there is resistance to including typing
on the national curriculum as the liabilities in the
long term don't bear thinking about.

Besides, how many programmers that you know
have ever actually learnt to type formally?

I've taken time off between contracts because of
strains before now. But then I hardly type as per
the textbook these days, despite having learnt to.

But a copyright declaration at the bottom of a post
is likely to remind any tempted student that pasting
it in willy-nilly would indeed be plagiarism just as it
would copying any other source wholesale. Something
it may be easy to forget at 3AM with a looming
deadline.

As such I see it as a courtesy, even if it is the
equivalent of wearing shorts. And good practice.

Again, this is something I prefer to view as you exercising
your right to make copies of your work available to the
public--a right which it appears may be being infringed in my
case, as per my opening paragraph.

You wouldn't be able to enforce copyright if someone slurped
it off a website and pasted it in an essay yet it doesn't stop
people making declarations to that effect on the webpages
they produce.

Thinking more cynically, why did YouTube make a point
of saying copyright would reside with the originators of
material they plan to pay the equivalent of a royalty to
if the copyright declarations on custom-built blogging
sites didn't imply an arrangement more like that you
allude to above with various, unnamed, publishing houses?

G DAEB

COPYRIGHT (C) 2007 SIPSTON
--