On 10/26/05, Brown, Darin Darin.Brown@enmu.edu wrote:
But in many fields, esp. mathematics and some scientific fields, the distinction between "facts" and "creative work" or "ideas" isn't so clear-cut. A previous poster seemed to imply, if I understand correctly, that one cannot write, e.g. "E = mc^2" without attributing fair use to Einstein. This seems ridiculous to me.
Two things:
1. "Scientific facts" cannot be copyrighted. I am fairly sure that even "scientific theories" would fall under this. Of course, claiming priority for something you did not come up with yourself is unethical, but I don't think there is any recourse to copyright law. Scientific laws cannot be copyrighted. Specific scientific _procedures_ can be *patented* (not copyrighted), but that does not prohibit discussing how they work in any way (it just puts limits on how one can reproduce them). 2. It should be noted of course that E = mc^2 would not be copyrightable anyway because its copyright, if it had one, would be expired (was published in 1905).
In mathematics, there often is no way to "paraphrase" a result, so that you are presenting "the facts" but not the "creative work". For example, suppose someone in analytic number theory proves yet another technically tedious result on the zeta function. Just imagine an expression full of integrals and special functions that goes on for an entire line (or more). By the above interpretation, how is one to present this result without violating copyright? After all, there is no way to "paraphrase" the equation. And what about a proof? One can always paraphrase a proof, but at the end of the day, you're really violating copyright in spirit under the above interpretation as much as if you copied verbatim.
I'm pretty sure mathematical proofs would not be copyrightable. They do not represent "creativity" in the legal sense -- they are the logical followings of a given set of circumstances. (None of this is meant to imply that they don't require a great deal of creativity in a larger sense to process and figure out) At least, that's how I'd imagine a court would rule.
Even in something as non-scientific as the writing history (I say this as a historian, mind you), "facts" are not copyrightable. Even a particular structuring of them is not unless taken more or less verbatim. Again, not giving credit (plaigiarism) is a bad thing, but in many instances copyright law provides little recourse for that unless it was truly copied from an original. I could write my own version of the same facts in a given book and have full claim to a copyright in this instance. In fact this happens all the time -- such is how most "popular" works of history (and science) are composed. Sometimes people resent this, but I've never heard of a successful copyright lawsuit in this respect.
This brings me to another point that I don't think was addressed when I brought it up -- many people seem to think that NOR means that every single mathematical argument in wikipedia requires a reference to the published literature. Again, this is ridiculous.
I think a good line of work with NOR is to say that every fact which could be reasonably contested should be cited. That is, if I write an article the History of X, and I say that on such-and-such a date, so-and-so did something, I might from the get-go assume that this is common knowledge (at least among specialists). If someone comes to the talk page and says, "Hey, I don't know about that," then it is my duty to pull out some other source which says it. I think citation is allowed to be an evolving thing.
A practical example: In the [[eugenics]] article, there were a lot of statements about what the Nazi sterilization programs were like (common knowledge amongst most people who have done a little reading on this). A fellow who did not know much about this history came along and said that he found these things incredible and wanted a citation. And so I gave him half a dozen. No big deal -- a legitimately contested fact is worth citing. There are limits of course -- people who come in and demand a citation for things such as "World War II occurred" can probably be regarded as people trying to game the system in some way, but I think with good faith, good judgment will prevail.
It's not hard to reference literature. It's also not hard to have nested referencing -- for example, I needn't cite that there was a government called Nazi Germany in the article on eugenics, but there can be ample citing in the article on Nazi Germany for that to be sufficient.
FF