Re: [tlug] OT: interesting NY times article:High-Tech Japanese, Running Out of Engineers

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Edward Middleton writes:
 >     *Article 18.* (1) The author shall have the rights to offer to and
 >     to make available to the public his work which has not yet been made
 >     public (including a work which has been made public without his
 >     consent; the same shall apply in this Article).[1]
 > 
 > This second part, about including works that have been made public 
 > without consent, would suggest that you have to verify that a work was 
 > made public legally the first time before you could republish it.

This is a misinterpretation, as the title of that subsection ("Moral
Rights of Authors") clearly indicates.  This is about the right of the
author to see her work made public, not about the (lack of) rights of
the public.  You never have the right to republish unless you can show
a chain of title derived from the author, so whether a previous
publication was legal or not is moot.

This article means that it's not possible to exclusively transfer
copyright; in Japan, the author always maintains a "moral right" to
self-publish (cf Article 50).  Unfortunately, once it has been made
public, I guess that right isn't available.  I wonder if that could be
interpreted to say that if a book goes out of print, the author has
the right to self-publish?  Probably not. :-(  It pretty clearly does
mean that publishers had better not drag their feet, because the
author can self-publish in the term between the transfer of (economic)
copyright and the publication of the work.

My understanding is that this Article is also often used by government
employees, whose work is by contract copyright by Japan (and in the
opinion of the Publication Bureau of the MOF, owned kanji, kana, and
punctuation by that same bureau :-( ), to publish their programs as
free software.

Also, I suspect a new edition by the author would always be self-
publishable under these articles, although I bet the courts don't see
it that way. :-/

I hadn't looked at this in a while; one fascinating aspect is that a
derivative work is (in American terminology) effectively jointly
authored.  That is, the author of the source work maintains the same
rights in the *whole* derivative as does the author of the derivative,
including the perpetual moral rights (cf Article 18 and 28).  Another
interesting aspect is that lending libraries have to get special
permission from copyright holders (Article 26ter).  Pretty
restrictive.

OTOH, Article 20, para 2(iii) seems to say that reverse engineering
and modification "for the purpose of more effective use of the
program" is always permissible.  In other words, you may always
distribute patches.