User talk:David Pierce/Metaphysics

I created a page called "Metaphysics" as a draft for an article on R. G. Collingwood's book An Essay on Metaphysics. I intended the page to be below my user page, but it seems I put it below the article on the actor David Pierce instead. Now User:Extreme Unction has corrected my mistake.

I would ultimately name the page something like "An Essay on Metaphysics (Collingwood)".

Meanwhile, User:Zunaid tagged the page as having a possible copyright violation. I do not know why.

• The page has a few short direct quotations from Collingwood; that is fair use of his Essay, as far as I know.
• The page summarizes a number of chapters of the Essay, and it gives the names of those chapters. Somebody might think there is more detail than is wanted in an encyclopedia, but I still don't see a copyright violation. Is the summary so good that it says exactly what Collingwood says, albeit in many fewer words?

David Pierce 06:53, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Hmmmm. I *may* have over-reacted here, oops! I tagged it because:

1. It was in the main Wikipedia namespace (where it didn't belong)
2. I thought it was going a bit further than fair use in providing chapter by chapter summaries ← I could be wrong here.(I am probably right, see below)

Sorry! Zunaid 07:13, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Update: This from the Copyright Problems page:

Under Wikipedia:Fair use policy, brief selections of copyrighted text may be used, but only with full attribution and only when the purpose is to comment on or criticize the text quoted. ( bold italics as copied from page, plain italics added by me for emphasis.)

Zunaid 12:23, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

I am confused. Do you still have a problem with my few direct quotes from Collingwood? If so, I shall remove them. Or are you saying that a detailed summary is a form of copying that may violate the rights of an author? Wikipedia:Fair use suggests:

If unfree material can be transformed into free material, it should be done instead of using a "fair use" defense. For example, the information in a newspaper article can easily be used as a basis of an original article and then cited as a reference.

It seems to me that I have been "transforming" Collingwood's book into "free material". There is a difference: my subject is not Collingwood's subject, but Collingwood. If anything, this should make my work freer. On the other hand, if I emphasize too much that it is my work, then I run into the prohibition of putting original research on Wikipedia. So what is to be done? David Pierce 14:07, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

I am not quite sure by what route, but User:Matia.gr asked me to take a look at this to see if I could help with the copyright question. First of all, I'm not a lawyer and have no legal training (I'm an electrical engineer), but I have acquired some knowledge of fair-use in US law (I'm from England) from working here for some time, and spending some chunk of that time dealing with Wikipedia:Copyright problems.

I think that you are probably, in some sections of this article, erring on the side of infringement and in other are within fair use. It is important that you identify what you are quoting, and that you quote it and that you then comment on the quote. Also, you should not quote more than you need — fair use demands we use as little of the copyrighted work as possible. David Pierce says above "It seems to me that I have been "transforming" Collingwood's book into "free material"". This is more or less a statement of a derivative work: so it does not escape the protection of copyright. I have the book from my University library, (the 1940 edition, which appears not to have an ISBN on the hardcover; the dust jacket if ever in existence isn't anymore). I randomly looked at Chapter IV: I can see you have quoted quite extensively from the Definitions and Propositions but slightly reworked them, without actually saying you are quoting. The examples appear to be your own, unless they come from the newer edition. I think that you are more likely to have a good claim if you actually quote, cite it as a quote, and then write your, more extensive, commentary on the quote. Make undeniably clear what is yours and what is not and undeniable that you are commenting on the text itself. The same is true of various other chapters, although I have not looked at them all.

From reading the article, I do not think you are really talking about Collingwood; you seem fairly clearly to be analysing his work. As you mention, this may run afoul of WP:NOR, since Wikipedia should report what others have said of the work, and WP:V would have you provide references for what they said. Your own interpretations would need to be based on that kind of work.

I note that my copy was published in 1940, and the new edition in 2002. Either way, the text has not entered the public domain in the United Kingdom (where it was published), or in the US since there are 70+life and 50+life years protections respectively.

Does all that help at all? -Splash^talk 21:27, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

It seems to me that three different questions are floating around, concerning

1. fair use of material under copyright,
2. plagiarism (that is, appropriate use of sources), and
3. appropriateness for Wikipedia.

All of these questions should be addressed at some point, but the question that should be settled now is the first. It seems to me that the second question is not so relevant, as I shall explain. The third question is also currently irrelevant.

Another question is: Who decides? Who decides whether the notice of possible copyright violation can be removed from the article that I was working on? User:Zunaid gave two reasons for attaching the tag in the first place. One reason was completely irrelevant: the article was in the wrong place. This was a problem, but not a copyright problem. In any case, that problem was solved by User:Extreme Unction.

The present article consists of notes for a possible article in the main namespace. I have read several books by R. G. Collingwood, including his Essay on Metaphysics. Now I have been reading the last again, making notes on each chapter, and writing up the notes here. If I am allowed to finish this work, I shall consider whether the notes should be further condensed before inclusion in an article on the Essay.

If I had not mistakenly put my notes in the wrong place, perhaps they would not have been noticed, and no copyright question would have been raised. Nonetheless, wherever I put them on Wikipedia, they are freely available, so perhaps copyright questions can be legitimately raised.

In my notes, I am trying to say what Collingwood says, but to say it more briefly by an order of magnitude (at least). I am trying not to add anything, since additions to Collingwood's thought would constitute original research. It follows that I tend to use Collingwood's vocabulary, and some of his phrases. I tend not to use whole sentences from Collingwood, since sentences selected from here and there in his book would not form a continuous whole. Still, my writing may read like Collingwood's.

It seems that I am doing just the sort of thing that was found, in the Macmillan Co. v. King case of 1914, to be a copyright violation. It seems also that fair use has changed a lot since then.

User:Splash suggests quoting Collingwood explicitly, and then commenting on the quotations, rather than writing sentences that sound like Collingwood's but are not designated as quotations. But here Splash seems to be addressing the question of plagiarism. The article on plagiarism contains the following quote:

Three different acts are considered plagiarism: (1) failing to cite quotations and borrowed ideas, (2) failing to enclose borrowed language in quotation marks, and (3) failing to put summaries and paraphrases in your own words.

(Note that the article leaves the source of this quotation ambiguous!) Possibly I have been violating points (2) and (3), but I am not sure. In any case, as I suggested above, the question of whether I am plagiarizing here is irrelevent. I am trying to write down Collingwood's ideas succinctly, and no more. I have tried to make it clear that that is what I am doing. If I didn't make it clearer, it was because I thought it was at least clear that my article was no more than a rough draft. I can pursue the work in different styles, but if one style violates copyright, then, it seems to me, all styles will.

Or perhaps not. Splash thought that the examples I used were my own. They were not; they were Collingwood's. I would be happy to make up my own examples; I did not do it, because it might seem like original research.

In The Principles of Art (1938), Collingwood writes,

we must get rid of the conception of artistic ownership…Let every artist make a vow, and here among artists I include all such as write or speak on scientific or learned subjects, never to prosecute or lend himself to a prosecution under the law of copyright.

That book itself has no explicit copyright. All of Collingwood's work would be covered by the vow he recommends. However, the first edition of An Essay on Metaphysics (1940) is copyright by Clarendon Press; the second (1998), by Teresa Smith (who I believe is Collingwood's daughter).

I suggested that, under American law in 1914, my work so far might be successfully prosecuted. But perhaps not, since nobody is making money from my work. In any case, from the Copyright Act of 1976 (quoted at fair use), we have

In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

2. the nature of the copyrighted work; 3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

I note correspondingly:

1. My work is educational, and not for profit; in fact it is intended to stimulate interest in Collingwood, which interest would increase sales of Collingwood's book.
2. I am trying to express Collingwood's ideas; ideas are not subject to copyright, only a particular expression of them. On the other hand, my expression of them may be judged close to Collingwood's, although mine is very much shorter.
3. I am trying to address the whole of Collingwood's book. No defense here.
4. I am not trying to replace Collingwood's book. If I can say what Collingwood says, but say it in a tenth or twentieth or less of the space, well, why didn't Collingwood do this? It is because my notes will not make full sense by themselves. My notes can serve as a reminder to those who have already read Collingwood, or as a guide for those who want to read Collingwood. It is possible that some foolish student might write a paper saying, "According to Wikipedia, Collingwood says…" A responsible researcher would use my notes in order to look at the relevant chapters of Collingwood himself. So again, it seems to me that my work can only increase the market for Collingwood's books.

More on the last point: Wikipedia contains vast amounts of material on profit-making enterprises, like Seinfeld or Pokemon. If my work on a book about metaphysics violates copyright, then I should think the work on these other subjects does too. I aim to summarize Collingwood's Essay chapter by chapter. Wikipedia summarizes Seinfeld episode by episode, character by character. Somebody with an imagination can recreate the Seinfeld show from this work. But this work is not prosecuted, because it does not reduce the profitability of the show.

Likewise, my own work would not be prosecuted. That's the way it seems to me, although I am not a lawyer. I propose that the tag of a possible copyright violation be removed from the present article. Then the other two questions above can be addressed.

David Pierce 09:01, 29 November 2005 (UTC)