Are Transcriptions Copyrightable?

[mamselle]

This just came up in another context.

Do people who do transcriptions of foreign-language primary sources consider those transcriptions as protected work?

I cite a passage if I've adopted someone else's transcription for an original text I can't get access to in the original, or whose rendering mirrors or spiffs up my own a bit, and I'd hope others would do the same for mine.

But that's not the first thing I worry about when putting something out for general viewing, that someone might lift my transcriptions....they seem to me sort of a stock-in-trade, not so much a set-aside activity.

But maybe I'm wrong.

Ideas?

M.

[Vkw10]

The U.S. Copyright Office says a work must be "an original work of authorship" to be copyrightable. It mentions "created independently" and "sufficient amount of creativity" as factors in deciding whether a work is copyrightable.
https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf

Copyright law includes some copyright protection for translations, as discussed in this circular on derivative works
https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf.

Is a transcription the same as a translation? I tend to think of transcription as writing down the words said rather mechanically, the way I do when I pull out my French-to-English dictionary, while translation conveys the nuances and literary qualities of the original.

Interesting question, mamselle. Like many legal questions, the answer seems to be, "it depends!"

[mamselle]

In this context, the discussion came up around renderings of, say, Latin texts where one is not simply translating the words, but re-registering the paleography with all its scribal abbreviations, elisions, etc.

There is (occasionally) blood on the floor over a misinterpreted diacritical or a vexed squiggle across the lower bar of a "p," say, or a "q," in conferences.

But in the main it's just the work that goes into squinting at the things in the afternoon light of a dusty, dimly illuminated library, and figuring them out before the place closes, when they won't let you get a good photo of the page because you've reached your page cap for photos for that manuscript (KBR/Bruxelles, I'm looking at you...15 photos is NOT enough!).

I've just always thought of it as one of the things we do to feed forwards, but a researcher just objected to putting materials online because they didn't want others to be able to steal their transcriptions, which puzzled me because that wouldn't have been the part I'd have been concerned about.

Thanks for the copyright citations, that's a start.

I also queried the person by email (and later got a flag saying they'd accessed my Academia site...) so I'll be interested to see what they say further.

Others?

M. 

[Hibush]

I've just always thought of it as one of the things we do to feed forwards, but a researcher just objected to putting materials online because they didn't want others to be able to steal their transcriptions, which puzzled me because that wouldn't have been the part I'd have been concerned about.
M.

If you take a photograph of the manuscript, then you have the rights to the photograph. That is a wierd sort of loophole. If you put the photograph online, you can attach rights (various forms of CC seem the easiest to implement).

That copyright would prevent others from directly reusing the image itself. Likewise, any sketching or annotation to interpret the image is copyrightable. If that is the kind of stealing causing concern, there is a remedy.

Others are of course free to transcribe the text by using that image, but they should say where they saw it. They can't claim to have originated any interpretations drawn on the image. Others are also free to take their own images of the same piece of text.