Fiction and nonfiction seems like a very natural way to categorize works. Is anyone really going to argue that scientific papers are works of fiction? Would any reasonable court hold that up? All laws have to deal with the natural fuzziness of concept space. But if libraries can manage it successfully, surely the copyright office can.
1. The strange cave of Ali Baba (or how to explain Zero-Knowledge protocols to your children) - Jean-Jacques Quisquater - Advances in Cryptology - 1990.
2. The fable of the Tyrant Dragon - Nick Bostrom - Journal of Medical Ethics, 2005¹.
This is a work of fiction designed to make a statement about the stance of society towards fighting aging.
The categorization could go either way. Leave it up to the copyright office to decide.
However given the context of an allegory in a larger work of nonfiction, or it's publication in a nonfiction scientific journal, I would lean towards saying it should be nonfiction.
> Fiction and nonfiction seems like a very natural way to categorize works.
But what about
- popular scientific books
- popular scientific books that embed the science into a nice story
or
- science fiction books
- "hard" science fiction books, which are strongly oriented on physical theories
- a description of a highly experimental physical theory embedded in a nice framework of how alien civilizations might take use of technology that this theory enables
or
- Books about historical facts
- Novels that are strongly based on historical facts and even interviews with contemporary witnesses, that nevertheless use some little literary license (for example The Gulag Archipelago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago).
- Novels that are based on historical facts that nevertheless take some literary license to make the story more exciting
- Fictional story that is occured in some concrete non-fictional historic time
or
- A scientific description of some ethical thought experiment
- A novel that is based on some ethical thought experiment, where in the story some academic person gives a quite scientifically accurate description of the thought experiment
- A novel that is based on some ethical thought experiment
See my comment above replying to someone else. There might be some fuzziness, but in context it's easy to classify. And for the weird outliers, the copyright office can make the call on how to classify them. Almost all of these seem pretty straightforward to classify. Just ask yourself what category you would find the work in a library?
>popular scientific books
Certainly nonfiction.
>popular scientific books that embed the science into a nice story
Not sure what you mean, but that sounds like fiction even if it has some science in it.
>hard" science fiction books, which are strongly oriented on physical theories
Same thing.
>Novels that are strongly based on historical facts and even interviews with contemporary witnesses, that nevertheless use some little literary license (for example The Gulag Archipelago
Well your own wikipedia link classifies it as fiction at the bottom. In fact all the examples of novels that are loosely based on truth are fiction.
But no one is ever going to claim a scientific paper is a work of fiction, and should be protected for 100+ years.
>A scientific description of some ethical thought experiment
This seems like the only fuzzy example. But such a thought experiment will almost always be in the context of a larger nonfiction work. And it will be published in a place like a scientific journal with other nonfiction, and be placed in the nonfiction section of a library. So that seems like the most practical and natural classification, legally.
Non-fiction pop sci isn't funded in the same way as scientific research.
Authors are paid to write pop sci, and it's very hard to produce a good book without getting paid an advance which allows a significant amount of full-time research.
If you create a system that can't pay advances, you're limiting pop sci to amateur efforts and short Wikipedia articles.
It's true a lot of pop sci isn't all that great. But the best books are literally life changing, and it's really not the best idea in the world to make it impossible to fund them.
>But no one is ever going to claim a scientific paper is a work of fiction, and should be protected for 100+ years.
There should be no question that scientific papers should be public, because the public has already paid for them.
Private research can be protected by patents, so there's no reason not to share the research with the public as long as commercial implementations are protected.
Hold on, I never said completely abolish copyright for nonfiction. I suggested reducing it to 10 or 15 years. Most pop sci will have no economic value after 10 years, so it shouldn't change anything.
It's utterly ridiculous that an out of print 1950's textbook by a dead author, is still protected by copyright. How is society benefiting from this arrangement at all?
