Many years ago, I was responsible for the intellectual content for the website I wrote for the company I was working for (btw, that was back in 1991, when the web was new) and I spent many hours designing the content, tweaking the graphics and designing the icons and such. As a result, I spent some time researching copyright and learning what I could do to protect myself using the legal means at my disposal, <disclaimer> ianal! YMMV! </disclaimer>
What I found is that copyrights and trademarks are enforcable through the policing of your rights to the copyright and trademark. (at least in the USA that is)
If you identify that someone is violating your copyright or trademark and you take every possible effort to remove that violation, then the copyright or trademark is legally owned by you.
But let's say that over the course of the years, you have abandoned your published works and you no longer support the products under the banner of your trademark. If someone else comes along and uses your trademark, and you do not make an attempt to enforce your ownership, then you forfit your right to own that trademark. If you show a precedence of not enforcing your rights to the published material, then you will lose your rights to them.
I once put this idea to the test in a physical sense.
According to the laws in my state, an abandoned vehicle is such if a legal attempt to contact the owner is made and the owner does not claim his ownership of the vehicle.
I discovered a vehicle that was abandoned and sent a registered letter to the owner of the vehicle. The owner did not respond within 30 days (which was the legal limit) and so I took posession of the vehicle. Registered the title as abandoned and proceeded to take it home and use it as a parts car for my 1972 Cutlass Convertible!
So, if the owner of something does not enforce their ownership of something, then it is abandoned and they lose all rights to owning it!
Just my 2 cents worth...and again, IANAL!
Take this for what it's worth!
Ed
web/gadget guru
Download Newton packages directly onto your Newton: http://newton.tek-ed.com
Dale Raby <daleraby@gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
This is legal semantics. Did he write it? If so, then it is "his", in one
sense, but if he didn't copyright or patent it, he might have difficulty
establishing a legal claim to it. Also, there is a question of whether or
not his patent/copyright could be broken. I have "invented" lots of things
over the years, but somebody else "invented" them first, a patent on "my"
flash steam engine would never stand, nor would one on "my" actual
honest-to-God-really-works-right-now-with-today's-technology nuclear fission
star drive. Quite possibly a copyright could be broken if it could be
proven that somebody else wrote it first. Then, though, that "somebody"
would have copyright as soon as he wrote it down.
A better solution might be for some talented individual to write his own
version of that driver independent of the one in question. Unix existed
before Linux, yet Linus Torvalds did not "steal" the code, nor are the
developers of Haiku "stealing" BeOS from Palm. They might achieve different
ends, but get there by different routes.
Dale, if anyone does steal your photo and publish it against your will, I
> hope you'll sue their trousers off.
Well, much as I'd like to think that my photograph of Ronald Regan receiving
a dog as a gift from a supporter in Green Bay, WI is worth stealing, Ronald
Regan has been dead for some years now, so any value my photograph may have
is in the far future, which is why it will end up in a museum archive. Some
researcher may discover it some day and it may see the light of day again,
but that will be a long time in coming. In any case, I doubt that I shall
sue anybody over it.
Shalom.
> Christian, Ornery Old Anti-capitalist
>
> Us Ornery Old Men tend to be long-winded, I guess.
Dale
Don't You Love Mistyping URL's....
------------------------------------------------------------------------
....when they turn out to be pretty neat.
In this case I was trying for Engadget.com, and instead wound up at www.edgadget.com which appears to have lots of Newton software.
- ProfessorF from the UK pcpro/macuser forum
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