Now I am enlightened. :) I learned something new today! ;)
Rafael 'Dido' Sevilla wrote:
It's a question of the government's balancing the public's sacrificing its right to free speech to give incentives to the people who create music, novels, computer software, and other similar things. An author does not have a natural right to her creations as you seem to think. The copyright is created only by law.
So I need to apply for a copyright as an author, or can I just slap a copyright onto my work right before I publish it? After the copyright comes the license which specifies the terms of use for the product right?
Copyright is more just like your deed to property -- what is yours is yours, and shall be the owner UNTIL you 'consciously yield' your rights to that property.
It isn't. Have you got a text of some copyright law that states this? I've never seen one that puts it quite that way.
Not really text on copyright law, but more like a conceptual parallelism. A simile -- as a figure of speech. It's how I understand how it works.
Think more carefully. It is a restriction on freedom of speech. For instance, without a license from the author of a poem, I do not have the right to recite the poem in public (fair use may apply though, but that's yet another complication). I do not have the right to republish a copyrighted book without a license from the author, making it also a restriction on freedom of the press. The government creates copyright, creating limitations on these freedoms, because it will help stimulate the creation of more content.
On the instances:
(1) Poem -- that's if you consciously knew that the poem wasn't yours right? But say, in some freak accident, or some stroke of luck, we both write the same poem (statistically improbable, but nonetheless possible), does my reciting the version I wrote in public violate your copyright on the same "content"? I've really been wondering a lot about this occurence for a while now...
(2) Freedom of the Press -- the freedom of the press enables the press to write about anything, and publish anything. The freedom of the press does not include reproducing copyrighted content. :) However, plaigerism is another thing the press have to deal with, which is another form of piracy.
No. I'm saying that thinking of ideas as property is an effect of swallowing the IP propaganda pill, and the wrong perspective it creates is a muddle we can better do without.
Ok. :)
Agreed. Unauthorized copying shouldn't be done, because the laws that prevent it generally serve their purpose, and violating them causes more problems than they solve in most cases.
Couldn't have said it any better. :)
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