On 1/28/07, Ron Watson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I don't see how we're asking for expansive rights by not allowing > corporations to take our work in its entirety, display it and profit > from it with no attribution or direct linkage. I don't see how > seeking permission and or compensation for usage of our work is > somehow a giant leap. > > There's some kind of disconnect.
The disconnect is that I'm making a technical point about what copyright can and can't do. Copyright gives you different powers over taking, displaying, and profiting. It gives you great power over redistribution. In the case of displaying via an embed it gives you very little power (though over aspects of the law might help). In the case of profiting it gives you no power at all. If you want to use copyright to control displaying or profiting, that's an expansion of copyright. There's also the issue of your desire to have more power to control corporations than to control individuals. The law has to be the same regardless of who you are. Your right to restrict corporations based on who they are is equivalent to allowing corporations to set special restrictions on individuals. In fact, that pretty much is the reality, and it's a big problem. Huge entertainment companies will not do business with individuals. If you're not an entity on the scale of Ford or Yahoo, you are a non-being. Hence control over culture is out of reach for most people. You have to have some giant corporation sponsor you if you want a voice. Restricting the ability of third parties to reuse your work in ways you object to (or want to be paid for) is mainly an issue of whether you can enforce your will out of court using common sense and technology. One way you could enforce your will using technology is rewrite rules. Another way is DRM. Another way is to create content which is intrinsically hard to copy, like a web application. Another is to work on content which goes stale very fast, like a news ticker. There are plenty of others as long as you're able to take the initiative. There are many people here who feel that you shouldn't have to exert yourself. But that's childish, and in in the end it ensures that only big corporations can participate in culture. over and out, Lucas p.s. That's it for me. This was not fun and I won't do it again.
