CAB@SU-AI.ARPA.UUCP (07/20/86)
Col. G.L. Sicherman is right: there are problems associated with the copyright of fonts. But don't quit reading yet, there is more to say about this.*** The West German typeface protection law attempts to deal with issues like the ones he raises. The ATypI committee on typeface protection also has discussed guidelines for interpreting newness and originality in type design. A dense, closely reasoned book has been written about this one law. I will cite it in a future message. *** There are also problems with copyrighting works in natural language, not dissimilar to the one that Col. Sicherman raises for typefaces. For example, one can take a copyrighted passage, and by applying well-known grammatical rules that are in the public domain, since they are part of the competence of speakers of the language, make substitutions and transformation that change the work and make it different and new, but leave much of it recognizeable. THE WASTED LAND 1. Burying of the Dead March is the cruelest of the months, breeding daffodils out of the dead land, mixing up memory and longing, arousing torpid roots with sweet showers. The Winter kept us warm; it covered the earth with insulating snow, and gave a little nourishment to dried bulbs. . . . . Although I botched up this particular plagiarism of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land by heuristic methods, it would be possible to do it by program. One could even randomize the number of changes, within certain bounds, and thus be able to claim that the imitation was different by a certain amount, but unpredictably so. In this case, approximately 50% of the words are different in some way, but those who know Eliot's poetry will recognize this version as a knock-off, if not an actual rip-off. Of course, it's not as good as Eliot's original (for example, I was afraid to leave the month name of April untouched, since it's a dead give-away, so I changed it to March, which is close, but then I lost the delicate allusion to Chaucer's Prologue to the Canterbury tales, so I had to slip that in by changing "spring rain" to "sweet showers" -- hope it wasn't too heavy handed for all you Chaucer fans out there) and I completely punted the Greek, Latin, and Italian passages in the Waste Land prolog, because foreign languages are more difficult, and besides, if you really want all that erudition, what are you reading a knock-off for? I could also blend some famous poetry together, almost as simply as shuffling cards, for example, Keats and (pseudo-)Eliot: Much have I travelled in the realms of gold, but April is the cruelest of the months, breeding Many goodly states and kingdoms to be seen, and lilacs out of the dead land, mingling the way round many western islands where I've been, with memory and desire, and stirring Bards in fealty to Apollo held, and dull roots with spring rains. . . . Of course, it's hard to do this with great poetry like they used to write back in the old days of literacy, but it's easy to do it with simpler works, like children's books -- RICK and JOAN Look, Rick, see Splotch run! Oh, oh! Run, Splotch, run! See Baby Silly! and so on. These ideas are so simple-minded that no one could ever claim copyright on them, since any one of 400 million speakers of English could very likely utter something like this. There just aren't that many possibilities for sentences of 3 to 5 words. There are inherent problems with all copyright. That's why copyright violation claims are handled in courts, where people hear arguments and attempt to make reasonable interpretations and decisions. Copyright isn't a writ from heaven, with a thunderbolt for sinners: "Gad, it was just a horrible surprise. He was just sitting there with his bit-map editor on his workstation, messing around with some fonts that he had uploaded from his LaserScribbler's Crypto-ROM, when a 10 pixel font seemed to get too much like Alloyed Lintotype Helvertical Bold Condensed (R), and all of a sudden there was a high-voltage arc-over from the power-supply, and he was blasted into a cinder. Of course, font piracy is a serious crime, but this is a little too Draconian for comfort. Copy-protection shouldn't be carried to such an extreme."