On 9/8/00 1:46 PM, Lizard ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote
>It is quite simple.
Not really.
>There is no moral or ethical obligation to pass on work derived from
>material in the public domain -- since anyone can access the same source
>material freely.
This same argument applies exactly to your paragraph below: you got it
for free, so pass it on for free (note that "free" monetary is different
from "free" unrestricted -- both apply to this case).
>There is, however, an argument that if person 'a' is willing to allow
>you to use his *private* *property* for your purposes, you, in turn,
>have an obligation to show someone else the same consideration. It's a
>basic 'trickle down hospitality' system of ethics -- that if someone is
>kind to you, you should be kind to someone else in turn. You pay back
>your benefactor by being the benefactor to someone else.
And when you draw off the cultural gestalt, you are taking from many,
many authors, and indeed the entire body of the world, rather than one
person. So you should be kind to the people (the collective history of
our species) in the same sense that you are stating above.
I agree with you in as far as "passing it on" is a good thing to do, I
just don't personally feel that it is immoral (for example) to say that
other people can use your commercially free works, but not modify them
and redistribute them themselves. After all, they have the same freedom
you did when you created the work: to go back to the original source and
do the work themselves.
>No one was being kind to TSR, WOTC, or Disney when they mined work in
>the public domain for their creations -- therefore, they have no
>obligation to pass along that generosity. WOTC, however, has voluntarily
>allowed people to use their property to create derivative works -- and
>the creators of those works, in turn, ought to allow their creations to
>be so used.
Disney in particular has produced a huge dividend by mining the public
domain, and used litigation or the threat of such to keep their resulting
works protected. I've often thought that Disney was rather ungenerous in
doing so, but I don't think it's strictly unethical -- just unattractive
to see.
The same goes for WotC and TSR. I think both have added enough value to
their work to be right, if they choose, in forcing others to go back to
the primary sources.
>In other words, since WOTC did not actually 'receive' any freedoms from
>the non-owners of public domain works, they, in turn, do not have any
>freedom to 'pass on'. Since the creators of material derived from
>copyrighted and trademarks works ARE receiving freedom, they, in turn,
>are morally obliged to pass it on.
Sure they did. You receive the ultimate in "free" on public domain
works. The freedom to create unlimited and unrestricted derivative
content, and limit and restrict that new content in any way you see fit.
That's a tremendous boon.
>Fairly simple, really. Unless you go with the anti-propertarian concept
>that there is no such thing as intellectual property, since every
>creator is a product of his culture, and culture belongs to The Masses.
That's inserting "oranges" into an "apples" debate. I simply do not
recognize your distinction between "public domain" works mysteriously not
being subject to "quid pro quo" logic, and copyrighted works being so
subject: in either case, you are limited precisely by the terms of use
on the original work, and what those terms limit YOUR distribution to.
It just happens that with public domain works, the limits are "none".
--
Russ Taylor (http://www.cmc.net/~rtaylor/)
CMC Tech Support Manager
"Oooh, Marge, they have the internet on computers now!" -- Homer Simpson
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