On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 02:50:40AM +0200, Polytropon wrote: > On Fri, 17 Jun 2011 04:07:08 +0400, Peter Vereshagin wrote: > > > > It's just a matter of a freedom to speech to me. And to everyone else > > I believe. > > Copyright and ownership of creation just makes sure that someone can't > express OTHER's work as his own, as it is currently in the media in > Germany - "honorable" academics (now politicians) got convicted having > copied massive amounts (>50%) in their thesis, without STATING that > they copied them (proper quoting with identification of the source).
This is not really true. Plagiarism is not the focus of copyright; copying is. That's why it's called "copyright" (at least in English), and not "attributionright". There is, in fact, no law that specifically relates to attribution per se, at least in most countries. To deal with plagiarism, one must look at the specific case of plagiarism and see where the act requires running afoul of some other law as well. Fraud would be the most obvious case, except for the fact that in most jurisdictions one can generally only effectively pursue a fraud case if there is money involved in the act of fraud. Copyright itself is, absent any associated side-effects, reducible to one of two things (depending on perspective): monopoly or censorship. It is sometimes used to punish people who plagiarize, but only because it is often difficult to plagiarize something without copying and distributing it somehow. > > Software publishing and licensing terms are very different, considering > today's software. On one hand, there is code without mentioning of > author, copyright or ownership. Then there is the "rape me" BSD-style > licenses, the "contribute back" GPL licenses, and proprietary EULAs > that traditionally do not take code into mind, but restrict the users > in what they are allowed to do with programs. I find this a particularly biased description. Would you like to rethink the phrasing "rape me" as a description of copyfree licensing terms as embodied in a BSD License? > > Keep in mind that _those_ are not licenses as the previous ones - they > are a _contract_ that you implicitely sign (by using, by opening the > package, by buying the software or the like). They're not really contracts unless you explicitly agree to them. Implicit "agreement" is a matter of licensing, because it depends on copyright law. Contracts only depend on other laws not prohibiting them. Organizations such as Microsoft, however, certainly do work hard to get the courts to accord the same enforceability as contracts to EULAs, but that does not mean they *are* contracts. -- Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
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