On Sat, Jun 6, 2009 at 11:30 AM, Beartooth <
beartooth@beartooth.info> wrote:
> On Fri, 5 Jun 2009, Simón Ruiz wrote:
>> It's important, and deliberate, that a person was required to seek
>> copyright, that it only covered certain types of work, that it was for only
>> 14 years renewable once by a living author, and that a copy had to be
>> archived in the library of congress, thus ensuring the work's availability
>> to the public.
>
> Item: having to seek created a lot of hardship; and it wasn't until
> ca. 1900 that Ainsworth Rand Spofford offered to accept all deposits for LC.
> (Before that, they went to all sorts of places, most of which didn't want
> them.)
I can see how that might have caused hardship back then for
particularly prolific authors.
OTOH, I don't think it's a protection that most people needed. (or
could get, as it only applied to printed books, charts, and maps)
Or did you mean a hardship to the government?
In a digital world, that might be either easier or it might be harder...
I dunno, maybe I'm just being overly cynical, but it's hard to think
of a copyright system that was created in the era of the printing
press, and which has been gradually and systematically bent, over the
past 70 years or so, to serve a very few powerful copyright holders,
and believe that it has any hope of becoming sane or rational through
the same law-making practices that bent it so far out of whack to
begin with.
This is probably why Lawrence Lessig moved on from working on
establishing a real "Creative Commons" to trying to "Change Congress".
>>> If they weren't being paid for what they write for their employers,
>>> what would they live on?
>>
>> At the risk of sounding like I'm just looking for ways to be contrary (I'm
>> not, I'm just enjoying an interesting conversation):
>>
>> I don't think coders are being paid for a manufactured good, code.
>>
>> They're being paid for their time, for the privilege of having all their
>> skills, expertise and experience focused on solving your problems.
>
> You might want to read what the Copyright Office has to say about
> works made for hire.
Oh, I know. The code never belongs to them, it's the I.P. of their
employers; they aren't being paid for their code, they're being paid
to build someone else's.
This "innovation" has been used by the RIAA to claim in court that the
artists that they contracted with were actually creating a "work for
hire" for them and so, in fact, copyright (and any royalties) should
belong to the record company rather than the artist.
Another example of how copyright law has become a weapon to be used
against artists and their customers.
> --
> Beartooth Implacable, Curmudgeonly Codger Learning Linux
> On the Internet, you can never tell who is a dog --
> supposing you care -- but you can tell who has a mind.
Simón
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