> On Nov 15, 2015, at 12:00 PM, Johnny Billquist <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> ...
>> Personally? I think the rightest way is to eliminiate the legal
>> fiction called "intellectual property", as a good-sounding experiment
>> that has failed. It is not producing the effects it was put in place
>> to produce and it is producing a lot of other, ill, effects.
>
> Agree. I think the whole concept of intellectual property is weird. Calling
> some thought in your head a "property" have strange implications. If I say
> some words that makes you think of something, can I then make you violate my
> intellectual property? When if you thought of the same idea independently?
> How did you violate my intellectual property in that case?
>
> Weird...
>
> I think copyright law sortof makes more sense, and should be enough here.
There are a lot of diffent ways to approach copyright questions.
The first is to use only what is explicitly permitted. This is what Wikipedia
and gutenberg.org do. It is also what retrocomputing people who run public
domain software (like CDC COS or IBM OS/360 of the right vintage) or open
source software do, or those who obtain licenses, hobbyist or otherwise.
The second is to use what is readily available but stop when told to. This is
what google seems to do; it also seems to be the bitsavers approach.
A third is to claim that it's in the public domain if you can't find the owner,
or even just because "it's on the Internet". When I critiqued the
"abandonware" approach, this is what I was referring to. Note that there's a
difference between "I know it's owned but I can't find the owner, I'll use it
until asked to stop" (approach 2) and "I don't know the owner so I'll claim it
doesn't have one" (approach 3).
Somewhat unrelated is the argument about whether there should be copyright. If
you disapprove of it, you're of course free to seek a Constitutional amendment
(in the USA case) to abolish it. But you would get objections from anyone who
makes his living writing books, or newspapers, or magazine articles. Also from
a lot of people whose profession is the creation of software. If you've ever
published anything, unless you released it into the public domain, you've used
copyright (intellectual property law). That includes open source licenses, of
course.
paul
