Rodd Clarkson wrote:
On Wed, 2005-05-18 at 20:42 -0400, Jim Cornette wrote:
Copyright has taken on the traits of limiting creativity, usability,
improvements and the like.
Copyright just protects the authors right to use their material how they
deem fit. It in no way limits creativity. Usability and improvements
may be hindered, not directly because of copyright, but because of other
restrictions placed on the materials.
I, as a developer of GPL software use copyright to demand that anyone
using my software adhere to the license I've imposed on it, in my case
the GPL (or LGPL). Without copyright, anyone could just take my
software and use it any way they wished (including in proprietary
software) regardless of whether I approved or not. If I wanted this to
be the case, then I could choose another license, but I like to think
that if others want to benefit from my work then they should, but only
if they will allow others to benefit from the work they have added to
mine. But this is all license related, and has nothing to do with
copyright.
Don't blame copyright for limiting creativity - blame other factors -
like licenses - that are imposed on the product in question.
Rodd
Just after reading the prior response to this thread, I checked another
email account that pointed to the Red Hat Magazine. The topics were
patents, copyrights, trademarks, automated tools for software compliance
management.
I can't really argue about any of the topics that are not clearly
understood. It is a shame that people fear a flock of lawyers coming
after them for submitting things as simple as a funny picture or an
information file.
It is wise to try to prevent things that you might have started the ball
rolling to be used by others to demand money for something that you
might freely want to share. It is also bad for one to have hardware and
cannot get proper functionality because of trade secrets or whatever
invention of discourse they created to cause disputes.
I belive we are not to far out of sync w/ ideals, just the water is far
too muddy to ever come to a realistic conclusion.
Jim
--
<change_m2> Will LINUX ever overtake sliced bread as the #1 achievement
of mankind?