1847 Website

Of course not, and that is a good point. When is Amos going to try to "take down" eBay, and all the sellers who use Scott numbers and CVs to describe their stamps or covers?

But here's a question: 1847USA has a lot of detail associated with the stamps it displays besides the Scott number. I haven't checked, but is it possible that a lot of it derives verbatim from Scott catalogs, and that the website is a de facto substitute for the catalogs? If so, Amos to after it might not be so nefarious.

Just askin'.

Basil

cjpalermo, assuming that it could be done, why don't you tell these people approximately what it would cost to bring a suit against the copyright holder and fight it to a win. While you're at it. Tell them how long that would take, and tell them who would benefit. Fighting for a principle is one thing, but fighting for real is another.

The struggle you are all mulling over is not at all new, and there is a large body of legal precedent on the side of the copyright holder for the Scott cataloging system. Example:

Back in 1941 the APS worked with Clarence Brazer to publish the first truly illustrated catalog of Essays for US Adhesive Postage Stamps as it was called. Edward Mason had done such a catalog in two volumes in 1912, and had contrived his own catalog numbering system for it. But it was a low circulation item, and it never really caught on. Brazer had bigger dreams and contrived a system that was uniquely his own, except that it keyed on the numbering system Scott Publishing was using at the time for postage stamps. Brazer, and the APS Board, wanted that connection, and agreed to a license to get it. Here is the copyright notice from that catalog:




Some years later the Essay-Proof Society sought to update the Brazer catalog, and reproduced their update serially in their journal, ostensibly so that EPS members could review and supplement the listings prior to final publication. The APS owned the rights to Brazer's additions to the Scott numbers, which they granted to the EPS for the revisions, but due to the connection to the Scott cataloging system they would have to get a license from Scott if they wished to come out with a new volume. That never happened.

Instead, in 1991 the catalog project was relinquished to Scott to develop a section on essays as a regular part of the Specialized catalog. The EPS was delighted, since ostensibly the field of essay collecting could get greater coverage and exposure in the larger catalog. But behind the scenes the EPS knew it was giving up its greatest asset.

Immediately the section editor appointed by Scott, Bill Hatton, scrubbed the EPS owned Brazer numbers and replaced them with a code entirely of Scott's devising. So numbers like
184E-Aa became 184-E1a and
184E-Acc became 184-E2b and
184E-Baa became 184-E5a and so on.

In the 1992 Specialized Scott incorporated the entire 1941 Brazer catalog as the essay section, and by the end of 1993 the Essay-Proof Society ceased operation.

That is just ONE of the inputs into the Specialized, from one Society which contributed copyrighted work to its formation. And in all this, Amos Press had nothing to do with it, yet. They are merely the present guardians of a work that has other guardians for its long history - and the precedents for copyright law that cling to it are rich and deep.

Good luck to any David that seeks to come against this Goliath.

Pay the license fee if you can afford it. Life is too short.

I agree that fair use would be relevant to the question of whether copying and reprinting contents of the catalog is an infringement. I don't have enough facts to opine on whether it would be an effective defense, though. It's not clear from your hypothetical whether the reprinting is for commercial purposes or private, non-commercial use. Either way, fair use typically is much more limited than people think. It's really intended to protect bona fide journalists, university professors and truly individual private activity, when little of the work is copied and the market value of the work is unaffected. Commercial use, copying large parts of a work, copying qualitatively important parts of a work, or making parts of a work available to a mass audience even on a non-profit basis all make it difficult to predict how a judge would rule.




I agree with that, and that is what I was saying.



* The foregoing is an expression of personal opinion and cannot be relied upon as legal advice to anyone. To obtain legal advice, you should hire an attorney. I decline to form an attorney-client relationship with any reader. This is not an advertisement or solicitation. (If this message constituted legal advice, it would be followed by a bill.)*

The cost would be $0, or $25K, or $300K or more. There are pro bono associations and law school clinics that take this sort of case, and if they do the cost would be $0, or near that. Law professors especially like cases involving over-reaching by IP owners. Or, you could file a complaint followed by an immediate motion for judgment on the pleadings or summary judgment at near the $25K number; these are really purely legal issues not requiring significant fact discovery. If those motions failed, then yes, the cost to trial without a pro bono organization involved would be high. Time to resolution varies by court but could be as short as a year. The benefit could be significant by opening up freedom of expression in an important area.




I disagree. The unilateral notices or other actions of a publisher do not create rights where the courts have said there are none, and do not constitute "legal precedent." The cases holding that numbering systems are not eligible for protection have been decided long after 1941.

Whether to pay a license fee to Amos or others, to provide those companies with an incentive to undertake the sort of work outlined in your example, is a question on which reasonable minds can differ and I can understand that some collectors or publishers may wish to help Amos finance its business in that way because of a perceived downstream benefit.

Copyright notices are not what I had in mind by "legal precedent." I was referring to the cases that went to court challenging Scott which were won by Scott, such as past efforts by Krause and Minkus. I personally would have to dig for some of the cases that go back before 1960, but I am aware that there are some. The old journals like STAMPS make reference to them. But that isn't my thing, so I will let others chime in. As for the US Specialized and its numbering system, that has been defended successfully, but I do not know the technical grounds that cause it not to be treated as you say it should. You might want to look into it.

For what it's worth, here's an excerpt from a stamps.net article I found regarding Krauses late 1990s lawsuit.

Linn's Stamp News Puts Happy Face On
Krause-Scott Lawsuit Settlement

Yes, the collector did "win" with the announcement of this settlement---but so did a lot of other people. And it is more than possible that Haeseler was a bit optimistic when he said that, "Scott defended itself successfully against an all-out attack by Krause's lawyers."

One would have to be living in an Ivory Tower to believe that, in the end, Scott was "successful" in this litigation. Krause had retained the services of the nation's most respected trademark/copyright law firm (Jacobs, Holman and Stern of Washington, D.C.) and filed a 54-page brief challenging practically every aspect of Scott's copyright protection and licensing practices over a seven-decade period.

In the end, the Krause defense of Scott's litigation imposed upon Scott the absolute necessity to review the seriously uneven policing of its licensing policies---and in essence, to cave in to something they never wanted to do: give their chief competitor a license to use their numbering system.

But in a sense, Haeseler was only slightly correct in assuming the success of Scott in this litigation. The settlement avoids a costly jury trial---and the problems that Scott would have had in trying to defend a very sketchy, uneven history of both maintaining the copyrights on its catalogs and licensing widespread use of its numbering system.

For what it's worth... perhaps it might be of potential benefit
to inform Bob Allen of the details of the case, and to forward
to his legal representatives for study...

Here is an article about a parts numbering system lawsuit that supports what cjpalermo is saying.

It seems to me their numbering system is very similar to Scott's. No creativity needed.

Scroll down and click on "read the article here"
http://masslawblog.com/copyright/co...ystems-yawn/

essayk,

The Scott v. Krause litigation was not "won" by Scott. The case was settled out of court on terms that don't appear to have been made public. And since the suit was filed by Krause against Scott one could surmise (as some did) that Scott settled rather than risk losing. Settlements are not precedents. This litigation did nothing to establish what rights Scott has in its numbering system that I can see.

raymodj,

Interesting read at the link you provided. A couple of take-aways I got from it. First a court would look at how "original" the numbering system is. For Scott I would say "not very." The numbers themselves largely proceed from the order in which the stamps are issued. How original is that? Related, they would lok for signs of creativity. So Scott got creative and put some classes of stamps at the back of the book and switched to an alphabetic system of listing. Is that creative enough to justify copyright? Probably not. Second, they would look to see if the claim of copyright was being used to protect creativity or to quash competition. I don't think that is something Scott wants to see scrutinized.

I must say this is a great thread!
So, the numbering system is not per say a copy write infringement but the infringements comes from the usage of the illustrations, context of and the catalog descriptions?
So like Basil stated "if we refer to a stamp as "C3" that would not be an infringement of the copy write", but if we referred to the stamp as "C3AP 1" and gave a description of what Scott-(Amos Publishing) has in their catalogs then this is where the infringement would occur?
And if so how about the SCF family? Does the SCF family violate the copy write when a fellow member ask for information on a stamp and when replied we refer to what Scotts has in their book about the illustrations and the context and the description of such wording quoted from the catalog; would this be an infringement of the copy write law and SCF would be a de facto of the catalog?
And what about just verbally quoting from the catalog as to illustrations,context, descriptions of such stamps would this to be an infringement as well. If not just give Scott-(Amos Publishing) time and they may go after that aspect of the law.

As essayk stated prior "good luck to the Davids' going up against the Goliaths'".

Yes, that read was very interesting. Sounds like if fought hard and long enough Scotts just mite have to settle out of court again. Sounds like if they lost then they would lose a lot, but if settled out of court they just loose the battle and not the war so, they could fight another day.
I hope 1847usa wins because like a lot of family members I to used that site most frequent for information and also The swedish tiger but just for illustration comparisons.

Newby..y

We on SCF can repeat or quote from the catalog under the fair use exception, so long as we don't quote more than "x" percent (10%?). I would guess that fair use also gets ebay sellers off the hook also.

When I tried to sort out the banknote issues, Scott's specialized US catalog was insufficient for the task, or maybe I just could not figure out how to interpret it. The 1847 site enabled me to solve the problem.