Re: FW: fostering plagiarism

["Jeanne A. E. DeVoto" <jaed -at- BEST -dot- COM>]

At 11:56 AM -0700 7/1/98, Scott Miller wrote:
>So is this copyrightable? [HTML deleted]

Of course. It's an original work fixed in a tangible medium. (It is not
*patentable*, due to lack of sufficient originality - this method is
"obvious to one skilled in the art". But patent isn't copyright.)

>by myself. Was I too late? Was this already copyrighted? Am I off to
>jail? Or was I the first to use this, and can now go a rampage?

See above. Patent is not copyright. The fact that you own the copyright in
program code - or anything else - does not prevent me from independently
re-inventing the same code, only from copying yours.

>Nah... you can't copyright HTML code, it's a public standard.

Whether the language is a public standard has nothing to do with whether
work done in it is in the public domain. C is a public standard too, and I
hope you're not asserting that C programs cannot be copyrighted.

The relevance to technical writers is that we need to be careful about
thinking something we might use is somehow exempt from copyright
protection. Copying small bits of HTML is likely fair use (and in any case
is, in practical terms, unlikely to cause trouble); looking at code to see
how someone's gotten an effect is, of course, always legitimate; but
copying an entire site's HTML is not unlikely to get you, your client,
and/or your company into moderately unpleasant trouble if the victim of
your appropriation is big enough to afford lawyers.

Negotiating between these extremes requires a realistic understanding of
copyright, and "HTML is not copyrightable because it's a public standard"
is not, in my opinion, realistic.

--
jeanne a. e. devoto ~ jaed -at- best -dot- com
http://www.best.com/~jaed/
Morning people may be respected, but night people are feared.