On Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:04:29 +0000, Grant Edwards wrote: > On 2007-12-18, Jan Claeys <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Op Fri, 14 Dec 2007 16:54:35 +0000, schreef Grant Edwards: >> >>> Uh what? I don't know what country you're in, but in the US, it >>> doesn't take any time at all to copyright something. The mere act of >>> writing something copyrights it. I thought it was the same in Europe >>> as well. >> >> No, it's only copyrighted when you _publish_ it. > > Interesting. So, in Europe, if somebody steals something you wrote > before you get it published, they're free to do with it as they please?
Please do not conflate theft and copyright infringement, or theft and plagiarism. They are very different concepts, and confusing them does not help. > I'm glad it doesn't work that way here in the US. Over here, something > is copyrighted as soon as it's written (actually I think the phrase is > "fixed in a medium" or something like that). I'm not glad at all. The Change from an "everything is uncopyrighted unless explicitly copyrighted" model to a "everything is copyrighted unless explicitly exempted" model was only one of many deleterious changes to copyright law over the last half century or so. It means the merest throw-away scribble on a napkin has equal protection to the opus an author slaved over for thirty years (although in fairness you are unlikely to win a copyright case over the words "Meet me at the bar" scribbled on a napkin then tossed in a rubbish bin... *wink*). It means that there is a serious problem of "orphan works", where rare and valuable films from the 1920s and earlier are rapidly decaying into an unusable powder because nobody dares copy them lest the unknown copyright owners descend like vultures and sue you for copyright infringement *after* you've done the hard work of restoring our cultural heritage. (Although the orphan works problem is at least equally as much a problem of excessively long copyrights as it is to do with automatic copyright.) I dare say that European countries which have had automatic copyright longer than the US have seen far more of their national heritage (early film, photographs and the like) rot away. Discussions of copyright so often focus on protecting the author's privileges and ignore the opportunity costs of locking up works. When works needed to be explicitly copyrighted, something of the order of just ONE PERCENT of authors bothered to copyright their published works -- and just one percent of them bothered to renew it for a second 14 year term. That gives you an idea of how valuable copyright really is. For every Mickey Mouse, there are 100,000 or more works that don't have enough economic value to the creator to bother protecting -- but they're part of our cultural heritage, and maybe somebody else could build on top of it, like Disney built their empire on other folks' uncopyrighted stories and ideas. Even Mickey Mouse himself got his start in a derivative work of Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr. This newsgroup is a perfect example of the fraud that is the idea of copyright. Every single post sent to the newsgroup is copyrighted, and yet they invariable have no economic value to the author. If they have any economic value, it is to the readers -- but they don't pay for it, and we authors don't ask for payment. In principle, anyone who forwards on something they read here, or uses a code snippet in their own work, is infringing copyright. We don't need copyright to encourage us to create works of this nature, and in fact this newsgroup can only exist by pretending copyright doesn't exist -- there are informal conventions that unless somebody explicitly states otherwise, any reader can forward on posts, copy and reuse code, and so forth. (Disclaimer: for the avoidance of all doubt, I'm not suggesting that ALL creative works should be uncopyrighted, or that no creative works benefit from the encouragement of copyright.) -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
