On Fri, 11 Feb 2005, Craig J. Lindstrom wrote: > Actually copyrights do expire and they can only be extended if you can show > they are in use. To retain the copyright these documents were imaged and > are available in a collection. I think it costs around $1500. So no, it > isn't really a secrecy thing. It is to retain the reproduction rights to > reproduce or not is the copyright owner's choice. Sure people can violate
Can you provide a reference to the law that says so? I found these two forms online: http://inventors.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.loc.gov/copyright/forms/formrei.pdf http://inventors.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.loc.gov/copyright/forms/formrea.pdf The first seems to state that by now, everything's either already automatically renewed (and will be good essentially forever, assuming congress keeps extending copyright every time Mickey Mouse comes up for expiration) or, if neglected under the old laws (which did require explicit renewal), already in the public domain. I've never seen anything about works having to be published or in use to gain copyright protection. This FAQ at copyright.gov says that works need not be published at all to have protection: http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/ (Under "Registering a work") > that obey them. Just because you don't agree with a law does not make it OK > for you not to obey it. Also just because something is legal does not make > it moral, and that will be accounted for. Things which are illegal are not always immoral, though. Rosa Parks heroically broke the law by sitting at the front of a bus. Mahatma Gandhi frequently risked his life (and suffered many injuries) nonviolently breaking laws in India to bring about independence. Workers suffered beatings and imprisonment to give us the right to unionize. Homework: list at least 3 other people or groups who broke laws to bring about tremendous good. Richard Stallman pointed out that sharing is a very fundamental human process, and he feels that it's immoral not to share when you can, and immoral to prevent other people from sharing. He tells the story of trying to fix a print server when he was at MIT; he visited a friend who had tapes with the source code he needed, and asked politely for a copy so he could fix the problems he was having. The person said no, that the manufacturer had made him promise not to share the source code with Richard. He was so offended that he went on to form the Free Software Foundation, to which we owe much of the software we Unix users use on a daily basis. It's very convenient to shame people for doing what comes naturally to them when you disagree with it and someone has passed a law about it. (Shame on you, black person, for sitting next to me on the bus...) But many, many of the laws passed throughout history have been very, very wrong, and hopefully we've learned by now that laws do not absolve us from making decisions about morality. The LDS church left the United States en masse rather than trying to "work within the system" or complying with the inequities imposed upon them. Other people have successfully worked within the system. Others protest, sometimes violently, sometimes merely suffering violence. Others simply go about their lives doing what they feel works best, and when enough people even do only that, laws have sometimes changed (or the empire collapses entirely). Some days I wish every license agreement and copyright proviso would be immediately punished to the full extent of the law, so that the jails would immediately overflow and the laws would have to be fixed. (More people use P2P than voted in the last presidential election; how's that for majority rule?) Other days I worry that people will just get used to having their right to share violated by copyright holders, so I'm glad that they intuitively know that sharing is okay and act accordingly. Sharing copyrighted matierial with your friends is, incidentally, not at all a black-and-white issue legally, regardless of what the big interests would like you to think. The Betamax case established that taping things off the air is fine, First Sale doctrine established that you can sell copyrighted works on the used market, and I know of no legal precedent which suggests that non-commercially motivated sharing between friends is an offense worthy of conviction. The RIAA is bullying people by bringing lawsuits against them which they can't afford to defend, and that to me is criminal, but none of those cases have gone to court. And copying is neither legally nor morally equivalent to shoplifting, robbery, theft or piracy on the high seas (aarrrgh). > As one who has authored software it is comforting to know that if you stole > it, I have some sort of legal recourse against you. I am neither pro open Assuming you knew I stole it, where by "stole" I assume you mean that I gave a friend of mine a copy of it by my own effort and using my own media, in a private transaction that didn't involve you. By that logic, I could have had millions and millions of dollars /stolen/ from me -- even though my net worth is less than six figures! Maybe billions! Wow, I'd really be in the red. Or I would be when I found out. But not until then. Wait, what if I only *think* somebody's using "my" copyrighted information? I wouldn't even know if I'm being injured! See, it doesn't make sense. If you open up a pet store and your kittens disappear, you've lost something that you had, that you paid for. You don't have it anymore. But if people don't buy your kittens because the kittens you sold me had kittens and I'm now giving them away, did I /steal/ your business? Not at all. I'm glad I don't play that game, having to act like I'll be materially injured if people on the other side of the country use some code I wrote in a way I don't like. I go to work and write free software and research publications for people who want them written. In exchange they give me money. Why should I enlist men with guns to lock up people I've never even met just so I can /keep/ making money on what I write after I share a copy with someone else? > source or against open source be it software or music or writing. I believe > it is the author's choice, and that choice should be protected by law. I believe people's right to share good ideas, books, and movies with the people they love should be protected by law. And that you should have the right to create whatever you want using all the ideas you can find, and the right to pay people to create things you want created (like a chair, or a song). And then, when it's created and the creator gives you one, you should get to do what you want with it, as should anybody else who encounters it. Unfortunately, the law currently sides more with you (although it used to try to strike a balance, as the constitution intended), so you have to get permission to adapt Disney's Snow White in your own retelling, like they did with the version that was in the public domain (back when things still went into the public domain). And you can't copy your Disney DVDs to tapes your kids can destroy or watch in their playroom because of Macrovision and the DMCA (assuming you interpret laws as black-and-white as you seem to do). > Having said that, I have written software that is public domain (what open > source was called before the current open source craze), and software that > is patented. I chose. I'm sorry you chose to file patents. I intend never to hold one, and have turned down several jobs because I think it's unethical to wall off an IDEA, of all things, for a third of a lifetime. Several times now I've invented something on my own which I intended to release Freely, only to find that someone else patented it or an underlying technology and is just sitting on it, making sure nobody else tries to bring the idea to market without paying them whatever they feel like charging. I'll be well in my forties before the identity-based encryption patent will expire and I can let people use my dissertation project (which uses IBE) freely. Recently I read that about 50% of the cost of a DVD player goes to patent licensing. Which part of a DVD player is so magically wonderful that only that one special patent holder could have invented it? That's right, none of it. The lone inventor, working in his basement to invent things the world desperately needs but can't find a solution for, is a myth. No idea is as inevitable as an idea whose time has come. Markets work very fluidly, and find the solutions they need. If there were no patents, would all the biotech firms close up shop, so that no new medicines would be developed? Put yourself in their shoes: millions of people die of cancer. Their health care costs run into the billions. You have a bunch of medical researchers on staff who love to treat diseases. Everyone gets an F in Econ who can't find a way for everybody to win financially. Intellectual property is not property. Sharing is not theft. Ideas have creators, but not owners. -J -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
