On 01/03/2013 08:45 PM, John Dixon wrote:
Richard...
You are forgiven for feeling a bit 'miffed' this morning..:-) but, I think that
we should leave this one alone as I think that you are just about to open a can
of 'bad feeling'...
I agree with you, but only to a very limited extent, that intellectual property
should be protected... however, I disagree strongly with your view that not
maintaining the protection of intellectual property would remove the motivation
for creation... but I am going to stop right here as I would begin to 'rant'
...:-)
Dixie
Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2013 10:29:59 -0800
From: ambassa...@fourthworld.com
To: use-livecode@lists.runrev.com
Subject: Re: Shoutout to Colin
Robert Sneidar wrote:
> There ought to be some kind of clause in copyrights where if a
> producer who is not the author or developer of something sits
> on it and does not produce a product from it within a certain
> time frame, say 5 years, the author has the right to reproduce
> it themselves.
Just my 5000 Euros worth (as I cannot contain myself for just 2 cents).
Surely this argument is NOT about intellectual property rights, but
about the rights
of the most parasitic lots of all; the middle men . . .
------------------------------
I went to buy one of my sons a laptop 2 years ago; and aksed in the shop
for one WITHOUT Windows
preinstalled, and was told that was not possible.
So, I walked to the back of the store and through the door into their
backshop where a little
man was merrily installing OEM Windows on laptops; and, grabbing a bare
laptop asked to buy it,
and after some hot words with the manager, managed to buy the thing,
take it home and
install MINT Linux on it.
------------------------
Now my example is valid in that it refers not to the producers of the
computer sitting on its distribution, but the parasitic middleman.
------------------------
Somewhere in the Attic of my house in Scotland there is a voyager CD of
something to do with music by Mozart, and as
far as I remember, it was rather good stuff; and, luckily, in the attic
there are 5 Macs that can cope with it - the best being
a 5200 something; and, down the stairs there are 3 iMacs slot-loading
all running Mac OS 9. I hope to get over there in the Summer
and arrange for quite a bit of that stuff to be transported to Bulgaria
(especially my dear BBC Master).
Now, I don't know who produced the Mozart CD, but I would be quite
prepared to buy a version that functioned on a contemporary OS,
say Debian derivative linux!
I really wonder if the chap who wrote the software and had the idea
realises that with a small amount of effort s/he could
re-jig the thing for the current market. However s/he doesn't stand a
chance if some middle-man (publisher) is sitting on the
thing and won't let her/him do that.
While I can appreciate the sentiment, I have to say I would disagree
with this in practice.
The most important element of intellectual property is the international
respect for the act of creation, the recognition that the creator of a
work has complete say over how it's distributed from the very moment of
creation through a period of at least several decades afterward.
This is essential to maintain the motivation for creation. After all,
if there's no motivation to create, there's nothing to argue about
distribution over, since the work would never have existed to begin with.
For this reason I would tread with great caution into any area of
copyright law which might in any way inhibit the rights of creators.
Any creator can choose any terms they like for anything they create, no
matter how unreasonable they may seem. If I write a trivial software
product and demand $500,000 for it, that's fully my right - and yours to
ignore and just go build your own.
And if I write a novel and choose to cease publication after a certain
number of years, or to never publish it at all, that's also my right.
And you still always retain the right to write your own novel as an
alternative to my seeming unreasonableness.
The remedy for what we might see as abuses is up to us as consumers. If
a company like Adobe puts out great products like GoLive and LiveMotion,
and later abandons them and locks them away, we've come to learn what
sort of company they are and can make different choices going forward.
No matter what else we might consider, the rights of a creator are
paramount, since without them we risk having no creations at all.
Forgive me if I sound pedantic this morning, but I've been reading some
arguments in the FOSS world and there's just a bit too much "gimme gimme
gimme!" going on in some circles for my temperament, too much emphasis
on what some users feel they should be able to demand from creators but
not enough about reciprocal considerations.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/FourthWorldSys
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