On 13/01/2003 at 12:01 -0600, Nigel Hamilton wrote:
What if your rights as an author are drowned out by your employer's contract over you? Who was the person at Disney who drew Ariel, the Little Mermaid, for the first time? Is that image their propery? No. Disney own it. And Disney, being a corporation, will try to retain copyright on that depiction as long as it exists. Meanwhile, the real author will never be known.[...] the power is in the author's hands to licence it whatever way they want!
In case you think that doesn't apply to you, there have been arguments about this before on list. You may be happy to have to put your employers name on every piece of code you write (even if it's not during work hours), but plenty of people aren't and have found renegotiating such contract provisions to be necessary.
Do you percieve that my argument is not about stopping the existence of copyright, but stopping its undue extension both in time and scope to things it was never intended to cover, and by entites who were never meant to hold sway over it? The preceeding paragraph makes it clear you do not.Of course. The point I believe Andy is making is that copyright law no longer servers readers or authors, but publishers. Raging against the machine is exactly the point; the machine is what's getting the power, not the people.I totally disagree ... copyright protects the author ... and it's the underlying legal machinery that *makes* the GPL (and others) work!
*Please* read the Lessig article that's already been linked to twice. In case you've lost it, it's here:
http://www.google.com/search?q=lessig+oscon&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 # top hits
--
:: paul
:: we're like crystal
