> From: Seth Johnson > I am a bit astonished that you, Crosbie, have this notion of law -- > that we create everything in the law by statute.
It would indeed be astonishing for me to have that notion. I'm simply trying to demonstrate that the law, especially when it comes to the delivery of intellectual works to the public, is an ass corrupted by commercial bias and other ulterior expediencies. I am reminding people (not that many need it of course), that you cannot appeal to the law when it comes to assumptions about things such as the public domain - given the law doesn't recognise it (even if there are some accidental acknowledgements of the term by way of shorthand for 'not protected by copyright'). > The public domain is simply published information. That's my definition too. > Once it's published, it's free. You know how dangerous and ambiguous the word 'free' is. Let's be more careful and say "As long as everyone's rights to life, privacy and truth are upheld by all, once a work has been published, those members of the public who possess it are free to do what they will with it" > It might be a conceit that a distinction can be > maintained between making free use of published information, and > copying an author's expression, but it don't gotta be a law to be > true. The idea that the copying of an author's expression could be a right reserved to the author/assign, only arrived with the ability to control the printing press. Without that apparent control, no artist could hope to control other artists' use of their work. People have always been interested in the truth of authorship (against plagiarism), and perhaps until the digital age it has tended to appear peculiar that an artist would wish to overtly copy another's expression except for practice or reference, i.e. that the implicit aspiration has always been originality. > When we picked up arms against the Crown, we did it for natural > rights. The debate over the Bill of Rights was in significatn part > over whether enumerating some rights would limit the innumerable > rights of free "men." Read Common Sense -- that's the core text that > convinced the colonists that there was something to fight for. > > Information that's published is free, by nature. Free citizens are > endowed with innumerable rights by nature. We don't create this > circumstance with laws. I agree, but you do create laws that suspend these rights - for 'limited' times - with much hand wringing and angst from Thomas Jefferson. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@freeculture.org http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
