Julian Warner – författare

The Supreme Court of the United States in Feist v. Rural (1991) required that databases must have a minimal degree of creativity for copyright. The judgment was highly significant and the subsequent period is understood as the post-Feist era. It has been globally influential. However, the decision is extremely complex and remains unsatisfactorily interpreted. In particular, it has been impossible to illuminate the creativity requirement.The book gives an account of the decision’s conceptual structure, focusing on its full delineation of the opposite to creativity. In a radical and unprecedented innovation, it is correlated with an automatic computational process. Creativity itself is understood as non-computational or directly human activity concerned with meaning. Determining the presence of creativity is reduced to a four-stage test. This work then has acute practical current relevance to property in data in the digital age; it will also be of theoretical interest to, and is aimed at, researchers in, practitioners, and students of intellectual property worldwide.

The Supreme Court of the United States in Feist v. Rural (1991) required that databases must have a minimal degree of creativity for copyright. The judgment was highly significant and the subsequent period is understood as the post-Feist era. It has been globally influential. However, the decision is extremely complex and remains unsatisfactorily interpreted. In particular, it has been impossible to illuminate the creativity requirement.The book gives an account of the decision’s conceptual structure, focusing on its full delineation of the opposite to creativity. In a radical and unprecedented innovation, it is correlated with an automatic computational process. Creativity itself is understood as non-computational or directly human activity concerned with meaning. Determining the presence of creativity is reduced to a four-stage test. This work then has acute practical current relevance to property in data in the digital age; it will also be of theoretical interest to, and is aimed at, researchers in, practitioners, and students of intellectual property worldwide.

We do not need to look far for signs of divided consciousness with regard to books and computers. For instance, the United Kingdom Data Protection Act 1984 gave British subjects some rights of access to computer-held information on themselves but not to paper records. From Writing to Computers takes as its central theme the issue of a unifying intellectual principle to connect books and computers. Julian Warner uses an approach based on semiotics, and also draws on linguistics, information science, cognitive science, philosophy and automata studies. Covering a range of topics from the relations between speech and writing, to transitions from orality to literacy and claims for a transition to an information society, the author aims throughout to render complex ideas intelligible without loss of rigour. From Writing to Computers addresses ordinary readers who, as social beings and members of political communities, are affected by, and implicated, in significant developments in methods for storing, manipulating and communicating information. It is also intended for students of the disciplines on which the book draws: semiotics, information studies, linguistics, computer science, philosophy and psychology.

The ideas of information as an autonomous variable and of the primacy of theoretical knowledge have been recurrent themes in discussions of the information society. In this series of eight essays, Julian Warner provides a contrasting perspective on: Developing a manifesto for the study of information technologies in human history, Ways in which information technology is differentiated from standard economic concept of productive technology, Historical perspective to copyright, electronic communication and information retrieval, The meta-object distinction as manifested in information retrieval research and system development, Various forms and instruments of labor as related to the design and maintenance of information systems, Past and future developments in the evolution of a discipline.Together, they put a humanistic face on our often-unconscious notions of information technology