[sdiy] DIY and Serge scans from Synapse, 197x

[Neil Johnson]

> > In the case of a paid magazine article, copyright is transferred to the
> > magazine for publication? If the magazine then closes, does the copyright
> > automatically transfer back to the author?

In my experience with hobby electronics magazines the magazine retains the
copyright of the printed page, ie. the layout, the artwork, the formatting
etc.  So if I wanted to sell copies of the magazine articles, or put scans
of them on the web I would need their permission.

HOWEVER, if I redrew the diagrams, rephrased the text, reformatted the
text in a different form, then I would NOT be infringing their copyright,
because it would not be a COPY of what they had published.  As I
understanf it, copyright protects the PRESENTATION, not the content
(unlike patents).  Otherwise the first opamp inverter circuit published
would claim "copyright" on all subsequent published opamp inverter
circuits, which clearly is not the case :-)

Ok, this doesn't help if you just want to scan in some docs and put them
up on a website.  That would most definitely be a copyright violation,
since you would be copying the material (remember: presentation, not
content)  without the owner's permission.

If you retyped the words, or redrew the schematic that would be a way to
circumvent the copyright issue.  Tedious, but legally sound.

Neil

--
Neil Johnson :: Computer Laboratory :: University of Cambridge ::
http://www.njohnson.co.uk          http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~nej22
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