On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 11:01:41PM -0500, Nathanael Nerode wrote: > Yes, this is what SUCKS about current copyright law. The presumption is "All > rights reserved unless you have explicit permission".
The fact that it never expires is what sucks about it. The default copyright permissions aren't so bad, by comparison, as long as you're aware of it. :) That's one of the major contributions of debian-legal, in my opinion: making people aware of how copyright affects their projects (giving it at least the force of "sorry, we just can't distribute this safely"), that it can't simply be ignored, and that in many cases, it can be dealt with reasonably by ordinary humans. (In some cases--possibly like this one, where there may be accumulated licensing errors over years--it may be too late, though.) -- Glenn Maynard
