Intellectual property is nevertheless a valid concept. It's best to think of it in these terms:
Publication is the voluntary act of transferring private ownership of IP from the author to the public. The abominable distortion of the term IP comes when it is suggested that the author retains ownership after publication. This has never been the case. Copyright was designed to encourage such ownership transfers by granting the author a monopoly over publication/reproduction for a limited period of time. If it has (C) written on it, it means "Public Property". Unpublished/private IP belongs to the author. Published/public IP belongs to the public. It's really quite simple. -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/-rms%40gnu.org%3A-A-suggestion-for-publicgeodata.org--t1436700.html#a3878888 Sent from the okfn.org - geo-discuss forum at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ geo-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/geo-discuss
