On Tue, Oct 02, 2001 at 05:02:24PM -0400, _brian_d_foy wrote:
>
> > Copyright should go to YAS or Larry, whom ever will accept it.
>
> why should copyright go anywhere? my original point was that
> copyright should not be asserted by those don't have it, even
> accidently.
But it is, and it has been, and the more people who cooperate the
higher the likelihood that it will occur in the future. Look at
the sheer headache involved in, for example, distributing a snapshot
of CPAN on CDROM, or the hoops that had to be jumped through to
prepare a CDROM archive of TPJ. The more authors you involve, the
greater the chance of a copyright headache arising.
Take your average programmer; programmers are not in general fascinated
by the minutiae of copyright law. Now take the case of a programmer
who's signed one of those common all-your-IP-belong-to-us contracts
for their employer. *Anything* they write in the way of documentation
belongs, in principle, to their employer -- but it may not occur to
them to apply their employment contract to other lines of creative
work. ("I'm a programmer, why in hell should my side-line in poetry
belong to my employer?")
> Tom or Nat or anyone else should be able to publish
> and profit from their contributions if they choose to do so. books
> like the Camel or the Ram would be extremely difficult to write if
> every time an author wrote some documentation they instantly lost
> rights to their own work.
Agreed, which is why I noted that there should be a single source that
can grant permission to reproduce the FAQs, and which should not be a
profit-making entity. The grant of copyright to the foundation/whatever
should specify non-exclusive rights, so the author can re-use their
work elsewhere -- but it needs to be bulletproof, and on paper with
a signature or in some other form recognizable by a court before any
substantial contribution is accepted.
(Clue: why do you think the FSF insist that software released under GPL
with the GNU imprimatur should be signed over to them in writing? Whether
or not you agree with his politics, I hope you'll concede that RMS is
a bright guy who's done a lot of thinking about the mechanics of his
project.)
-- Charlie
