© Veterinary Sciences Tomorrow - 27 April 2004
Editorial
Anjop Venker-van Haagen
Writing a textbook equals
balancing on a copyright tightrope, or does it?
When you embark on
writing a textbook, as I did a while ago, you start out with the belief that you
will impress the scientific world with THE standard work on your subject. By
necessity, a textbook is a compilation, an authoritative corpus of what is known
and what has been written about a certain subject. And, in contrast to writing
fiction, you are going to use published material to support your facts and
statements, your opinions and interpretations. You realize, of course, that
published material is almost always protected by copyright. As the Oxford
dictionary asserts: Copyright is the exclusive legal right granted for a
specified period to an author, designer, etc., or another appointed person, to
print, publish, perform, film, or record original literary, artistic or musical
material.
So sooner or later you will wonder whether you should not
acquaint yourself with the rules that govern copyright protection, and you begin
roaming the web. This is what you will find: The rules for copyright protection
are laid down in a treaty, the Berne Convention for Protection of Literary and
Artistic Works, signed at Berne, Switzerland, on September 9, 1886; it includes
all arts, protocols, and revisions thereto, and like "Paris Text 1971", it is
adopted by many countries. The text of the Berne Convention for Protection of
Literary and Artistic Work (the Berne Convention) includes 38 articles and an
additional 6 articles in the appendix (http://www.law.cornell.edu/treaties/berne/overview.html).
All of them are accessible through the internet and can easily be linked to. One
gets the impression that there is no creative work on this planet unprotected by
copyright.
Then the important question arises: To what extent may I
quote from a work protected by copyright? Article 10 of the Berne Convention
deals with this subject. Since it was so important for me, the textbook writer,
I shall share the full text of Article 10 with you:
(1) It shall be
permissible to make quotations from a work which has already been lawfully made
available to the public, provided that their making is compatible with fair
practice, and their extent does not exceed that justified by the purpose,
including quotations from newspaper articles and periodicals in the form of
press summaries.
(2) It shall be a matter for legislation in the
countries of the Union, and for special agreements existing or to be concluded
between them, to permit the utilization, to the extent justified by the purpose,
of literary or artistic works by way of illustration in publications, broadcasts
or sound or visual recordings for teaching, provided such utilization is
compatible with fair practice.
(3) Where use is made of works in
accordance with the preceding paragraphs of this Article, mention shall be made
of the source, and of the name of the author, if it appears thereon.
Source: http://www.law.cornell.edu/treaties/berne/10.html
So
far so good: the textbook writer may make use of quotations as long as the
source, and the name of the author are mentioned in the text, just as it is done
in any scientific journal.
But there is a fly in the ointment. Some
editors/publishers of multi-author textbooks place a limit on the number of
references per chapter. The usual arguments are that pages in books are
expensive and that most readers are not interested in references anyway (with
the notable exception of the unquoted authors of the articles, of course). How
should one navigate between the economic Skylla of the editor/publisher and the
legal Charybdis of copyright protection? Even if the textbook writer would know
everything by heart about the subject covered in the nascent textbook, can he or
she claim its entire content as personal intellectual property (and have the
entire textbook copyrighted), without quotes and references? Legally, it can be
done, and perhaps a textbook in that style will please most readers. Whether it
pleases the colleagues and peers who have contributed to the subliminal
knowledge of the author and have stocked his/her memory is quite another matter.
No tightrope act for the textbook writer, but where is the line between science
and fiction? Is it really only a question of taste?