Copyright [LWN.net]

Copyright

Posted Dec 12, 2008 0:30 UTC (Fri) by mgb (guest, #3226)
In reply to: Copyright by tialaramex
Parent article: Free Software Foundation files suit against Cisco for GPL violations

You can create works for hire with or without copyright. But works for hire are rarely "creative".

Without copyright, original creative works are stifled. There's no incentive, whether monetary or social, in creating original music or art or software that can be taken and distributed under somebody else's name.

Copyright terms should be sensible - perhaps ten years - and software patents should not exist, but copyright itself is too valuable to surrender.

(Log in to post comments)

Posted Dec 12, 2008 2:51 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

This is why, I gather, some european legal systems have the concept of an author's moral right to be identified as such, distinct from copyright and non-transferable. I thought there were some moves to enshrine this in EU law, but don't know the status of that.

Perhaps someone more knowledgeable will chime in.

Posted Dec 12, 2008 14:46 UTC (Fri) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375) [Link]

The Berne Convention (home to the worldwide scope for protection of my copyrights in your country) identifies the moral right to be known as author. See Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works at Wikipedia.

Posted Dec 12, 2008 11:06 UTC (Fri) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

> Without copyright, original creative works are stifled. There's no
incentive, whether monetary or social, in creating original music or art
or software that can be taken and distributed under somebody else's name.

So I must be mistaken, that having thousands of people yelling your name,
because you are the one on the stage performing your music which they
happen to like is a social incentive. Or the money those people payed for
entry to such a concert would be any monetary incentive.

This must also be the reason why there is no music, art or literature,
that's more than 300 years old, which is the time when copyright was
created. Thank god we have it...

Posted Dec 12, 2008 16:33 UTC (Fri) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link]

You appear to have just awoken from three hundred years of sleep so kindly permit us to update you on some of the developments over the last few centuries. Printing presses are much more common and much faster and there are new and amazing technologies such as color copiers, DVD burners, and computers.

Bands can make a few hundred dollars per concert when their promotion consists solely of free downloads by their existing fans. Bands can make a few hundred dollars per head at a concert when they are aggressively promoted through copyrighted materials. The choice belongs to the bands, not the anti-copyright parasites, which is as it should be.

Similarly software authors can choose how to license their creations, whether GPL or BSD or something nasty they made up after reading the first chapter of a law book. The choice belongs to the software authors, not the anti-copyright parasites, which is as it should be.

Without copyright their would be no shareware and no GPL, and far fewer people would become FLOSS authors for the honor of seeing their creations make fortunes for Bill Gates and nothing for them.