Re: [NTLK] newtontalk Digest V1 #181 (copyright discussion)

From: Eric L. Strobel (fyzycyst_at_home.com)
Date: Fri Sep 07 2001 - 09:24:05 EDT


at the temporal coordinates: 9/6/01 11:06 PM, the entity known as Stainless
Steel Rat at ratinox_at_peorth.gweep.net conveyed the following:

>
> * "Eric L. Strobel" <fyzycyst_at_home.com> on Thu, 06 Sep 2001
> | (where permanent = lifetime + X years). What I take from that is that when
> | someone is no longer actively profiting from their work (whether by choice
> | or through the march of time), then the entire reason for the copyright is
> | gone.
>
> In this you are sorely mistaken. Copyright, the right to copy. That
> includes *not* copying the work and not allowing anyone else to copy it, if
> that is your choice. As I said, copyright cannot be involuntarilly
> forfeited. Copyright can expire; it can be transferred to another; it can
> be voluntarilly revoked, placing a work into the Public Domain. But it
> cannot be lost.
>
> "Actively profiting" has nothing to do with it. An immediate example is
> anything distributed under the GNU Public License, the gist of which is, if
> you use GPL code you must openly publish your code under the GPL or a less
> restrictive license, thus expanding the body of GPL software available to
> everyone. People who publish code under the GPL usually make no profit
> whatsoever, other than the warm, fuzzy feeling it gives them. Companies
> like Microsoft hate this kind of license -- which is enforced by copyright
> law! -- because they cannot take GPL code and use it themselves without
> openly publishing their source code and depriving themselves of their
> revenue.
>

This is all well and good if your topic is CURRENT copyright law. However,
my recollection (I'm at work right now and my NTLK archive is at home) is
that your partial quote was taken from the part of my message where I was
discussing things I'd read about what the likes of Jefferson and Madison
thought about intellectual property. And to them "actively profiting" (my
phrase, not theirs) WOULD matter a great deal. If you go back and look
again at what I've written, I think this should become clear. After all,
there were some folks writing the Constitution that felt there should be NO
copyrights, but rather that ideas should be totally free and unfettered.
The concept of establishing a window of time similar in size to that of
patents was put forward to ensure someone could reasonably profit from their
ideas. It was NEVER intended to be a monopoly on the idea/creation that
would last far beyond the author's lifetime, as this was totally repugnant
to the Constitution's framers. Rather, as someone so nicely put it when
talking about the current law's truly absurd time horizon, (sorry if I mess
this up), "You can thank the Mouse for that."

- Eric.

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