"Dave Crossland" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Copyright used to be an 'Industrial regulation' that effected only > publishers who copied and distributed works, and the Internet has > already made everyone a 'non commercial publisher' who can copy and > distribute worldwide.
Non-commercial in what way? I pay to publish and I am paid to publish. Smells like commerce to me. So-called "non-commercial" terms like Creative Commons are usually really one-sided, unfair and anti-commercial terms: *I* can be paid for use of this work, *you* cannot be. It's a classic free-only-for-those-rich-enough type of restrictive copyright licence. As an aside, I feel that too many UK activists confuse anti-commercial with anti-corporate: corporations often have enough money to abuse the anti-commercial-licensed works if it helps them. Also, it's difficult to write an anti-corporate licence, because corporations usually employ other people to do their work. Using anti-commercial licences for activism is usually scoring an own goal. [RMS interview] > Meanwhile, the UK has legislated a perpetual copyright on Winnie the > Pooh. This was made to seem palatable because the royalties go to > charity; but it can serve as a precedent for perpetual copyright on > other works. I am sure the publishers want that. [...] Even before that, the King James V bible was controlled by letters patent rather than copyright: anyone know more about that? When I last looked into it, I didn't find much information. > RS: I've identified three broad categories of works. First there are > functional works: works that you use to get a job done. Second, works > that represent someone's thoughts: what certain people thought, or > saw, want, or believe. The third category is aesthetic or entertaining > work, where the sensation you get from looking at the work is the > whole point. I believe each category needs to be considered > separately. This is a totally false and arbitrary distinction. I may use works that represent someone's thoughts or works that cause a sensation to get a job done, or works that I use to get a job done may be aesthetic or entertaining in a way. What's more, making this distinction is dangerous: it may allow people to restrict the modifications to a functional work if they succeed in presenting it as aesthetic, and so on. That dangerous approach means that I must now view FSF the same way that RMS views CC. I can't recommend FSF in general at present, because to do so is to support non-free-software works implicitly. Pretty depressing state of affairs, IMO. Hope that explains, -- MJ Ray - see/vidu http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html Somerset, England. Work/Laborejo: http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ IRC/Jabber/SIP: on request/peteble. _______________________________________________ fc-uk-discuss mailing list fc-uk-discuss@lists.okfn.org http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/fc-uk-discuss
