Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
I agree. It may be that 80 years from now, it will be easy to check something like the Internet Archive and find the publication date on an old Amazon page. But for books that would be plausibly going out of the copyright in, oh, the next 50 years, it is typically easier to find the date of death. Even in the far-future case, I think there is much less likelihood of a date error in an obituary or (for Americans) on the public social security death master, than on an Amazon page, where a reprint date and original publication date can be confused or garbled.
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Yes.
Also, publication date can be hard to figure out even in real time.
- Is the text I'm writing here published? If I remove it next week, is it still published? If I get it commercially published in a year (as a part of "hildea's brilliant thoughts on Life, The Universe, and Everything"
), it is definitively published, but is the publication year 2020 or 2021?
- If I make a painting, display it in a public exhibition for a while, and then take it home, is it published?
- If I make a piece of art and sell, give or loan it to you, is it published?
I took a look at the Norwegian copyright law, which is called "The law about the creator's rights to works of the mind" (
Lov om opphavsrett til åndsverk). The basic principle is in the title: If you create a work of the mind (defined in the law), you have certain rights to it. Publication isn't necessary to trigger those rights, and shouldn't be.
As for the discussion about the right to
not publish something, I have one real life example: One of my favourite authors used to write fan fiction. When she got her first deal for original fiction to be commercially published, she informed her fans that she would take down her fan fiction, made a PDF with all her fanworks available for a limited time, and then removed it all. It's very, very obvious that if I published any part of her fanworks anywhere, I'd be going against her wishes. The law should protect her wishes regarding her works.