On Tue, 13 May 2014 14:42:51 +0000, alister wrote: > On Tue, 13 May 2014 13:51:20 +0000, Grant Edwards wrote: > >> On 2014-05-13, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> >> wrote: >>> On Tue, 13 May 2014 07:20:34 -0400, Roy Smith wrote: >>> >>>> ASCII *is* all I need. >>> >>> You've never needed to copyright something? Copyright © Roy Smith >>> 2014... >> >> Bah. You don't need the little copyright symbol at all. The statement >> without the symbol has the exact same legal weight. > > > You do not need any statements at all, copyright is automaticly assigned > to anything you create (at least that is the case in UK Law) although > proving the creation date my be difficult.
(1) In my lifetime, that wasn't always the case. Up until the 1970s or thereabouts, you had to explicitly register anything you wanted copyrighted, a much more sensible system which weeded out the meaningless copyrights on economically worthless content. If we still had that system, orphan works would be a lesser problem. With the current system, all of us here are technically violating copyright every time we reply to an email and quote more than a small percentage of it. Not to mention all the mirror sites that violate copyright by mirroring our posts in their entirety without permission. (Author's moral rights not to be misquoted or plagiarised are a different kettle of fish separate from their ownership rights over the work. That should be automatic.) (2) You don't have to just prove copyright. You also have to *identify* who the work is copyrighted by, and it needs to be an identifiable legal person (actual person or corporation), not necessarily the author. In the absence of a statement otherwise, copyright is assumed to be held by the author, but that's not always the case -- it might be a work for hire, or copyright might have been transferred to another person or entity. Or the author is unidentifiable. Hence the orphan work problem: it's presumed to be copyrighted, but since nobody knows who owns the copyright, there's no way to get permission to copy that work. It might as well be lost, even when the original is sitting right there in front of you mouldering away. -- Steven D'Aprano http://import-that.dreamwidth.org/ -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
