# Ever get the urge to deface or destroy religious propoganda in a public place? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [March 11, 2009, 10:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-get-the-urge-to-deface-or-destroy-religious-propoganda-in-a-public-place/489055 "2009-03-11T10:10:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 13
**Author:** ![Zeriel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/58956e/32.png) [@Zeriel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zeriel)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2009, 3:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-get-the-urge-to-deface-or-destroy-religious-propoganda-in-a-public-place/489055/241 "2009-03-20T03:15:09Z")
Furthermore, “moral rights” in the United States at least are limited to (by the VARA and Berne Convention) right of attribution, right of anonymity, and right to prevent editing of the work. The limited right of preventing destruction applies only to visual art “of recognized stature”. And in any case the moral rights against mutilation/destruction apply only to the text itself, not to the physical copy of the text–you don’t have a moral right to prevent me from destroying your book, but you DO have the moral right to prevent me from writing “fuck” all over it and reselling it with your name on it. ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2009, 4:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-get-the-urge-to-deface-or-destroy-religious-propoganda-in-a-public-place/489055/242 "2009-03-20T04:06:18Z")
> [@Malthus](#): > > I don’t have to agree with any of that. As I’ve said before, lots of things are free to take, and yet not free to wantonly destroy - in fact, that goes for every other consumable in the room, such as soap, **toilet paper** … Is scraping toilet paper against my ass and coating it with shit NOT wantonly destroying it? And come to think of it, I might do pretty much the same in the shower with soup. Um, poor choices there bud. 😛 ---
**Author:** ![Nzinga\_Seated](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/b5ac83/32.png) [@Nzinga\_Seated](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nzinga_Seated)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2009, 4:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-get-the-urge-to-deface-or-destroy-religious-propoganda-in-a-public-place/489055/243 "2009-03-20T04:31:31Z")
> [@JKellyMap](#): > > I know I’m wasting all your time with mere cheerleading, but I’d just like to say that this is a fascinating thread. Well-reasoned, never vicious, arguments from both sides, and I find mysef agreeing with just about everyone…which means I need to give it more thought. I was just thinking that this is indeed a fascinating thread, but I disagree with the rest of your post. I think DtC pretty handily took the arguments against his position and demolished them. I have never thrown a bible out, as that’s not my style and they will simply replace it. But DtC was making a different point. He was responding to those that thought it was trampling on freedoms and all that jazz to toss the bible away. He was making a good case, I thought, for the position that there is no victim as others seem to imply, except the Gideons which have to pay for the bibles; and if someone is making a statement against religion and bibles, then it is not pointless after all to cost them money replacing them, I guess. Diogenes took the opposing argument apart with surgeon like precision, in my opinion, and his pizza menu analogy was so brilliant that I will from now on refer to pizza menus as ‘gideons’. I was a little dissapointed to see him defend the practice of tossing the bibles as simply tidying the room, because he didn’t need that bullshit argument at all to make his point. Leave those kinds of embarrasing straw grasps for those that would try to make a point of the garbage being slightly heavier for the maids… please. But yeah, fascinating thread, indeed. These are the kinds of threads that I eat up, hoping to learn to sharpen my own debate skills and lay down some heavy shit on the next annoying Christian that starts harping nonsense in my ear. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2009, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-get-the-urge-to-deface-or-destroy-religious-propoganda-in-a-public-place/489055/244 "2009-03-20T18:42:35Z")
> [@Zeriel](#): > > Hmm, every expert opinion I’ve ever heard of the GFDL (I’m an IT guy, I ask IP lawyers about this kind of stuff admittedly) is that “many of the clauses are Richard Stallman being paranoid about book licenses” and “many of the clauses are only legally applicable in the current legal climate in the case of electronic/software texts and not necessarily for physical books.” > > I’d call a reading of a book a “public display or performance”–so a author could likely sue you for a book reading, but not for having the book sitting on a pedestal somewhere. > > Basically, I’ve never heard of a law or license agreement, pertaining to copyright, that prevents or punishes the destruction of mass-produced works. We’d have to get an IP law doper in here for any better than that. The limit of my knowledge, as imparted to me by an IP lawyer I was working for in 2005-2006, is as follows: > > 1. You can attach pretty much any license restriction you want on anything that manipulates the text of a copyrighted property. > 2. You can almost never attach any restriction to the physical media that text is contained on. The sole exception seems to be in the case of software media that often have (legally as yet seriously uncontested) clauses forbidding resale of the license to use the software. > > Even in the latter case, it’s perfectly legal for me to sell you a software disc, just not necessarily the right to use it–and even that is fundamentally tied up in the fact that software, last case law I’d heard, was held to be “copied” in the act of using it. > > I’m sorry I don’t have any further cites than this, but it’s going to be hard to convince me otherwise–my know-how is pretty much solely based on working indirectly with IP law as part of my living. My point is the rather fundamental one - that in the case of certain types of property and certain types of IP rights, the distinction between “the media” and “the content” does not appear to exist. While it is true that a freeware contract generally deals with IP rights, it is not necessarily the case that there is anything truly fundamental about licensing rights that states that one could not, if one wanted to, recreate via contract some sort of analogue to the statutory “moral rights” that exist in reference to an artist’s work - namely, the right not to have something you give to someone else destroyed. In short, while I cannot effectively argue against something that someone said back in 2005, I do not see that your point #2 is valid. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2009, 6:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-get-the-urge-to-deface-or-destroy-religious-propoganda-in-a-public-place/489055/245 "2009-03-20T18:44:11Z")
> [@Boyo\_Jim](#): > > Is scraping toilet paper against my ass and coating it with shit NOT wantonly destroying it? And come to think of it, I might do pretty much the same in the shower with soup. > > Um, poor choices there bud. 😛 You scrape soup against your ass and coat it with shit? Ewww. TMI. Not even possible. 😛 ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2009, 6:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-get-the-urge-to-deface-or-destroy-religious-propoganda-in-a-public-place/489055/246 "2009-03-20T18:49:38Z")
> [@Zeriel](#): > > Furthermore, “moral rights” in the United States at least are limited to (by the VARA and Berne Convention) right of attribution, right of anonymity, and right to prevent editing of the work. The limited right of preventing destruction applies only to visual art “of recognized stature”. And in any case the moral rights against mutilation/destruction apply only to the text itself, not to the physical copy of the text–you don’t have a moral right to prevent me from destroying your book, but you DO have the moral right to prevent me from writing “fuck” all over it and reselling it with your name on it. From what I understand from the document I linked to, that depends on the law of the particular state. Some states (see bolded quote) protect artistic works **generally** against “unauthorized destruction”. I would think this is sufficient to demonstrate that there is nothing inherent in the law of copyright which states that ‘the law of copyright shall never affect the right to destroy an object’. The contrary is clearly the case. ---
**Author:** ![maladroit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f475e1/32.png) [@maladroit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/maladroit)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2009, 7:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-get-the-urge-to-deface-or-destroy-religious-propoganda-in-a-public-place/489055/247 "2009-03-20T19:10:35Z")
I got some junk mail from some shady organization, with a ‘prayer rug’ I think they called it (it was paper and had a groovy picture of Jesus on it), and if you sent them money they’d pray for you. A big part of the literature was testimonials of blessings people had received from sending them cash. I thought it was pretty offensive so I sent in the card with my name as Alasdair Crowley. There’s a women’s health clinic a block from my house, and there’s always protesters out. I always want to flip them off but I figure that would only feed some perverse need of theirs so I just ignore them and think bad thoughts. ---
**Author:** ![Zeriel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/58956e/32.png) [@Zeriel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zeriel)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2009, 7:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-get-the-urge-to-deface-or-destroy-religious-propoganda-in-a-public-place/489055/248 "2009-03-20T19:25:19Z")
> [@Malthus](#): > > My point is the rather fundamental one - that in the case of certain types of property and certain types of IP rights, the distinction between “the media” and “the content” does not appear to exist. > > While it is true that a freeware contract generally deals with IP rights, it is not necessarily the case that there is anything truly fundamental about licensing rights that states that one could not, if one wanted to, recreate via contract some sort of analogue to the statutory “moral rights” that exist in reference to an artist’s work - namely, the right not to have something you give to someone else destroyed. > > In short, while I cannot effectively argue against something that someone said back in 2005, I do not see that your point #2 is valid. Point two is reinforced by the Doctrine of First Sale, which while being eroded is still very much in force for physical copies of media. ---
**Author:** ![Zeriel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/58956e/32.png) [@Zeriel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zeriel)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2009, 7:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-get-the-urge-to-deface-or-destroy-religious-propoganda-in-a-public-place/489055/249 "2009-03-20T19:34:51Z")
> [@Malthus](#): > > From what I understand from the document I linked to, that depends on the law of the particular state. Some states (see bolded quote) protect artistic works **generally** against “unauthorized destruction”. > > I would think this is sufficient to demonstrate that there is nothing inherent in the law of copyright which states that ‘the law of copyright shall never affect the right to destroy an object’. The contrary is clearly the case. While that may well be true, A) there is legal thinking (if not explicit precedent) to support the contention that VARA overwrote those state laws and B) they only apply to unique (in the “only one copy exists” sense) works of visual art. Basically, how would such a right against unauthorized destruction work in a real world context with books? If I can assign such a right to books, the fact that I’m also permitted to give gifts to people via the mail would mean that the Gideons would in theory be able to mail you a bunch of Bibles every morning (a mailbox being legally a public space that you are granted authorized use of, similarly to a hotel room), which you would then be unable to destroy. Soon your entire property is filled with Bibles. So there’s a reductio ad absurdium argument at play here. On the other hand, that right may well have applied in the past to unique visual works, whereby if someone sent you a unique painting they could in theory under NY or CA rules have prevented you from destroying it rather than reselling it or giving it away. In any case, this arguement is at best tangental, now that I think about it–most translations of the Bible are not under any copyright, therefore no copyright-based rights assign to the pieces of paper in a binding that are the physical representation thereof (anyone feel like doing the legwork to check what translation they use? I’m betting as a umbrella protestant organization they use the KJV translation) and as such the book itself, if as research done in this thread has proven is intended as a gift to the user of the hotel room, cannot be held to contractual standards due to lack of consideration, and so it’s simply a gift of a non-unique non-licensed physical object, which the end user can do with as they please. ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2009, 7:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-get-the-urge-to-deface-or-destroy-religious-propoganda-in-a-public-place/489055/250 "2009-03-20T19:46:28Z")
> [@Zeriel](#): > > In any case, this arguement is at best tangental, now that I think about it–most translations of the Bible are not under any copyright, therefore no copyright-based rights assign to the pieces of paper in a binding that are the physical representation thereof (anyone feel like doing the legwork to check what translation they use? I’m betting as a umbrella protestant organization they use the KJV translation) and as such the book itself, if as research done in this thread has proven is intended as a gift to the user of the hotel room, cannot be held to contractual standards due to lack of consideration, and so it’s simply a gift of a non-unique non-licensed physical object, which the end user can do with as they please. I thought about the copyright argument. But I think if you’ll check most editions of Bibles for sale, you’ll find that, in addition to the KJV or other such text, they contain footnotes, analyses, prefaces, commentary, concordances, maps, & so forth–ostensibly for the benefit of the reader, but also, I suspect, to make them copyrightable. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2009, 2:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-get-the-urge-to-deface-or-destroy-religious-propoganda-in-a-public-place/489055/251 "2009-03-23T14:46:22Z")
> [@Zeriel](#): > > While that may well be true, A) there is legal thinking (if not explicit precedent) to support the contention that VARA overwrote those state laws and B) they only apply to unique (in the “only one copy exists” sense) works of visual art. > > Basically, how would such a right against unauthorized destruction work in a real world context with books? If I can assign such a right to books, the fact that I’m also permitted to give gifts to people via the mail would mean that the Gideons would in theory be able to mail you a bunch of Bibles every morning (a mailbox being legally a public space that you are granted authorized use of, similarly to a hotel room), which you would then be unable to destroy. Soon your entire property is filled with Bibles. So there’s a reductio ad absurdium argument at play here. On the other hand, that right may well have applied in the past to unique visual works, whereby if someone sent you a unique painting they could in theory under NY or CA rules have prevented you from destroying it rather than reselling it or giving it away. > > In any case, this arguement is at best tangental, now that I think about it–most translations of the Bible are not under any copyright, therefore no copyright-based rights assign to the pieces of paper in a binding that are the physical representation thereof (anyone feel like doing the legwork to check what translation they use? I’m betting as a umbrella protestant organization they use the KJV translation) and as such the book itself, if as research done in this thread has proven is intended as a gift to the user of the hotel room, cannot be held to contractual standards due to lack of consideration, and so it’s simply a gift of a non-unique non-licensed physical object, which the end user can do with as they please. Well, this has some answers (if anyone is still following this thread - I’m enjoyong the legal debate, but I’m pretty busy these days …) 1. While it is true that the moral rights only apply to unique works of art, that is not the issue - the argument isn’t that the bibles are covered by “moral rights” (they clearly are not), but whether it is possible to attach rights to deal with a physical object someone takes for free, by contract express or implied. The contention was that such rights are _incompatible_ with copyright, which only deals with the content of the information and not the physical work … and it is that contention which is in debate. 2. I reject the reductio ad absurdium argument as inapplicable. The distinguishing feature is this - that the person has to make an effort to acquire the bible in this case. I would agree that if the Gideons were sending you bibles, that would be a different story, but here the person has to make an actual effort to obtain the thing. It is analogous to the difference between spam (sent to your email acount w/out your permission) and accessing an online website covered by a so-called “clickwrap” agreement. You must have seen these: "by clicking on this box you agree to the following … ". > **[Clickwrap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickwrap_license)** > > A clickwrap or clickthrough agreement is a prompt that offers individuals the opportunity to accept or decline a digitally-mediated policy. Privacy policies, terms of service and other user policies, as well as copyright policies commonly employ the clickwrap prompt. Clickwraps are common in signup processes for social media services like Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr, connections to wireless networks operated in corporate spaces, as part of the installation processes of many software packag The c... Note that actually clicking a button isn’t necessary for a valid contract to exist (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register.com,\_Inc.\_v.\_Verio,\_Inc](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register.com,_Inc._v._Verio,_Inc). : court upholds “browsewrap license”) 3. The text of the bible may not be under copyright (who would own it? God? 😃 ), but as has been pointed out, there are still copy-writable elements to it. 1. The doctrine of requirement for consideration is obviously pretty flexible these days. What “consideration” is there in clicking a website link? 99% of them are free. The proposition is this: that picking up a bible from a hotel drawer is no different than clicking a link on the Internet - in neither case are you paying for anything; that it is possible to create a binding unilateral agreement simply by having its terms on the website; that said agreement could limit what you do with the stuff you download or services you use, thus acting as a license for certain uses only; that it is possible, legally, that a similar limited license could exist for use of a bible left in a drawer, the terms of which are that you can take it for legitimate use but not to deface or destroy the thing. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ever-get-the-urge-to-deface-or-destroy-religious-propoganda-in-a-public-place/489055.md?page=12)