"Richard J Kinch" wrote in message
.. .
Ed Huntress writes:

The tap-drill table in MH is the same as any other I've seen. Are you
claiming *that* is IP's property? Which mathematical formulas belong
to
them?

I said representations. You can't copy their pages, whether they were
electronic or printed. I have the CD of the 26th Edition. The copyright
declarations are all over it, and the trademarks are registered.

Representations of public domain facts may or may not be protected,
depending on whether there is any original authorship in the presentation
per se. For much of the information in MH, there just isn't any genuine
originality possible for the presentation. There are not that many ways
to present a mapping of one set (standard tap sizes) to another set (118
standard drill sizes).

So one could theoretically (and I am certainly not the one to be
attempting
this as the guinea pig) copy all the "facts" out of MH and present it as
the most plain of HTML tables on Web pages.

The argument reduces to which elements of the book are facts vs which are
original authorship. In _Feist_, it was a table of names vs phone
numbers.
In MH, it is taps vs drills. I would expect you could publish, say, an
HTML version of that table on the Web all you like. Indeed, Google will
find many instances of identical tabulated facts on the Web.

Yet preceding that table are a few paragraphs of prose, discussing how
drilling and tapping is performed, how twist drills typically oversize the
hole, how reaming is better for larger diameters and finer threads, etc.
This sort of prose has some originality of authorship and might be
protected. Even then, the ideas therein are not protected and must be
freely publishible. The latitude of original expression in technical
information is highly restricted compared to ordinary literary works.

Agreed, one cannot now scan the paper MH and publish images of it,
verbatim, legally. Likewise the CD.

Well, Richard, that's exactly what's been done here. And that's a violation
of copyright. That's the event being referred to, that's what happened, and
that's what I'm reacting to.

Industrial Press, like others who find themselves in this situation,
probably feels it isn't worth pursuing. You could get a cease-and-desist,
but money isn't being charged, so you aren't going to get anything back.
You've lost sales to a thief but you have no way to recover; you really have
no way to prove it; and it's going to cost you even more money trying.

So, once again, the Internet provides moral cretins with a way to steal from
people with no recourse. C'est la vie.


I am perplexed by how a book that is 4/5 public domain facts and 1/5
original prose can leverage that 1/5 to make itself the sole publication
of
its type. You would think that the 4/5 would be freely available.

It isn't "original prose" that's at issue. It's the research, and the
compilation, and the fact-checking, and the proofreading, and the printing
and distribution and...

You get the picture. McGraw-Hill once asked me to update _The American
Machinist's Handbook_. Since I wouldn't steal from _Machinery's Handbook_,
and since M-H hadn't updated the _AM Handbook_ since 1955, I decided it
wasn't going to be worth it, at then-current prices, to re-research and
re-compile the book. That was in 1981. Today, I wouldn't even dream of
depending upon royalties in an environment in which people find such theft
so easy to justify, and so easy to do.


I'm also perplexed as to how the old theories of copyright can survive,
because they are based entirely on copies costing something to make, and
money changing hands for copies being made, neither of which is the case
on
a.b.e.

Not. They are based on compensation for work, for creative production, and
for return on an investment. If I spend a year to two years updating _AMH_,
I expect to be compensated, not to have my work stolen, whether it's
published on paper or on a disc.

I assume you do the same.

--
Ed Huntress