Mark Rafn wrote: > > Some authors' wishes are dishonorable (in some opinions).
That's a good point. I'm not sympathetic when they try to abuse the system. > > If pressed, I will break. At some point, technology should fall > > into the public domain or a GPL-like public domain even against an > > author's wishes, but people have already reached this tradeoff. > > Why? From a pure theoretical sense, if bits and ideas can be owned > and their use and distribution limited by an author, shouldn't that > ownership be permanent? Or do inventors/authors just lease their > ideas? > > What justification for having it expire in X years cannot be applied > to having it expire in X-1 years? Yeah, I get squeezed in on both sides. The other question I need to be able to answer is: What justification for letting it survive X years can't be applied to X+1 years? This particular belief of mine is partly subjective and partly objective. Subjectively, it seems right that, if somebody spends 30 years writing the best novel of the 21st century, she should be allowed to give the proceeds to the charity of her choice for as long as she wanted. After all, the book will be in the public library system soon so no one can claim that they are being denied access to it. Subjectively, it seems wrong that someone could abuse the copyright or patent laws to produce a monopoly like the one the justice department is in the process of breaking up. Objectively, by combining both subjective paragraphs above, you more or less end up with my general rule that copyrights are fine until they are abused. > >>> After all, it's your work. Of all the people in the world, > >>> you should have the largest say regarding how your work is > >>> used. > > But it's not just your work. Once it's put into use, it's the result > of your work AND the result of decisions and input by the user of the > work - any software program, once installed, becomes a joint work by > all authors and users. That's interesting. I haven't thought about that. I guess you're talking about feedback from the user community? Or do you just mean that it becomes a joint work by the user clicking on things and pressing keys? > > already, but for the benefit of the rest of use, I would recommend an > > addition to the GPL's preamble so that this bit of information is as > > widely distributed as the GPL. > > Why? Putting a philosophical statement at the beginning of a legal > document seems quite confusing. I thought that is what a preamble is for. There seems to be lots of philosophical stuff in there already. Why not insert the whole story? Paul Serice
