To each cow its calf, to each grad student a conference presentation
January 16th, 2006 | by aobaoill |Yay! Looks like I’ll be presenting my paper on an early – 6th century A.D. – Irish copyright case at the ICA conference in Dresden. [Yes, I’m aware it’s a rather specialized topic.] More fun – it appears that Jürgen Habermas will be one of the keynote speakers.
2 Responses to “To each cow its calf, to each grad student a conference presentation”
By Ray Corrigan on Feb 22, 2006 | Reply
Technically it wasn’t a copyright case as copyright didn’t exist at the time but the story of Colmcille, Finian and the battle of the book is indeed fascinating, as much because the issues raised are similar to those in modern digital copyright cases as anything else.
I was pointed at your blog via Elizbeth Townsend’s Academic Copyright.
By Andrew Ó Baoill on Feb 22, 2006 | Reply
I must admit I’m a little confused as to the basis on which Ray states that even though ‘the issues raised are similar to those in modern … copyright’ it makes sense to say ‘copyright didn’t exist at the time.’ I suppose it’s an issue of semantics. Some authors see an implicit understanding of copyright in Greek and Roman times, drawing on indirect remarks in the works of various authors. However, it wasn’t until the Statute of Queen Ann that we saw positive law being enacted through a legislative process.
What’s interesting about this case, though, is that it’s a judicial ruling on precisely the issue of whether the owner of a work has the right to control who can make copies of that work, and that – through analogy – the judge established such a right (or claimed to recognize such a right as pre-existing). It seems to me that this is no less a formal establishment of copyright than the much later legislative route.
The primary difference is that the Colmcille version vests the copyright [the exclusive right to control who can make copies] in the person who holds the original copy. That is, once one ‘legitimately’ receives a copy of a work, one is at liberty to make further copies (unless, presumably, a restriction, explicit or implicit, was placed by the person who provides one with the copy). Then again, later copyright restrictions initially concentrated on the rights of publishers rather than authors.