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posted by
martyb
on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:27PM
from the waiting-for-the-multiverse-donor dept.
from the waiting-for-the-multiverse-donor dept.
Over at the Meshed Insights blog, Simon Phipps writes about why the public domain falls short and more detailed licensing is needed in order to extend rights to a software community.
Yes, public domain may give you the rights you need. But in an open source project, it's not enough for you to determine you personally have the rights you need. In order to function, every user and contributor of the project needs prior confidence they can use, improve and share the code, regardless of their location or the use to which they put it. That confidence also has to extend to their colleagues, customers and community as well.
Source : The Universal Donor
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The Universal Donor (Open Source Licensing)
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In the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls.
-- Lenny Bruce
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday January 18 2018, @09:07PM (3 children)
I think you're right about filling in that this was directly stated to be a reply to an earlier article (which I haven't read yet, thanks for the C/P).
I wouldn't argue that public domain isn't a local conclusion. Perhaps more appropriately it's a defense against infringement or IP claims - it's not tested until and unless a suit is made over it and nobody "invented" it but rather it is a de facto condition which exists... that people started using as if it was a license grant. (That's my conclusion, feel free to disagree.)
But where he is putting the cart before the horse is (from TFA):
We have indeed seen people try to shift copyright into the status of unalienable moral right. My personal belief is that it should be a specialized form of property right and nothing more.
In the end, though, it all comes down to trust. If I assert that code is PD and is fit for use, and I'm wrong, does the project get to use that as a defense? And how is that any different from if I assert that code is GPL or CC licensed and legally fit for use, and I'm wrong? (Assuming in both cases it was proprietary to some other rights holder...)
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday January 19 2018, @03:01PM (2 children)
The advantage of potentially unlimited "moral" copyright is that it neuters the argument for unlimited copyright in general. If Disney had legal assurance that nobody could make a porno out of Steamboat Willy, they would have far less grounds to keep Steamboat Willy unavailable for derivative works.
It does real harm to Disney's future properties having non-family-friendly derivative content floating around out there. Moral rights fix that problem while leaving the door open for Disney to lose absolute control over the financial proceeds of old ideas. With such a framework in place, all that remains are economic arguments, which favor dumping perpetual copyright because it encourages companies like Disney to sit on a treasure hoard of old content and stop producing useful new ideas.
Just a pragmatic and preliminary thought on moral rights.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday January 19 2018, @03:28PM (1 child)
Very interesting. I wasn't focusing quite so much on the moral dimension as I was the idea that copyright is unalienable. IMVVVHO copyright is something that should not vest automatically without some form of registration and attestation in the medium it's fixed in. The notion that "it's somebody's with rights by default" is the issue for me, and I'd much rather have it be, "it's everybody's unless you have taken steps to claim it is your right uniquely." The process to establish a registry that something has a copyright as of a certain date should likewise not be onerous or expensive in the digital age, more like a public registry which would allow legal claims to have some prima facie justification because the third party registrar can attest that someone requested an item have protection as of a certain date. And done publicly because I also have issues with, "See, this was ours because we wrote it and hid it in a vault until just now. Surprise!" An entity should need to have it registered, even if confidentially. So we won't even go to patent amendments - I'm digressing severely enough anyway.
But I can see your point, that disallowance of derivative works works in society's favor / that assurance would enable an eventual copies to be made so long as the work was unaltered.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday January 19 2018, @04:01PM
The immediate problem with that is that registration isn't free, and small players don't know if what they've got is worth anything until they show it to somebody else (i.e. a publisher). Without automatic copyright protections, there's nothing to stop that person from publishing it without paying the creator.
Of course this isn't a problem with self-publishing. And the internet has made self-publishing actually feasible for pretty much anything. But the internet has also proven that without effective curation, there's very little difference between "this book/game/app was never published" and "this book/game/app is buried in a deluge of others of wildly varying quality".
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?