it's a pain, but I have, like many, acquired multiple email accounts for exactly this reason: spam avoidance. i use yahoo or hotmail, whatever...it's free, and if i start getting too much spam, i just get another account. i don't give out my "regular" email address(es) to anybody except friends and the like---people whom i know won't shower me with unsolicited and unwanted spam (as if there's a difference). it would be nice if there were an easier way--but i personally don't see any other solution unless you want to fight. and fighting spam is like fighting the birds in that hitchcock flick.
Copyright law says: I created it. I didn't create it as a work for hire. I own it. Simple as that.
Not quite that simple if you take patents into account. While copyrights make room for individual creativity, patents do not. If you patent a process (such as Amazon.com's 1-click), then others, although they may have developed the process in an independently creative fashion, do not have rights to that process--unless, of course, these rights are obtained from the owner of the patent. Thus, a wholly separate and independent piece of software may be null and void under patent law if it performs the same function as patented software process.
Currently, as far as I know, this is only applicable to business processes (i.e., Priceline and Amazon.com's 1-click), but it seems to set the precedent for future software patents covering much more than merely "business" processes. As a software developer, the implications of this are a tad scary.
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it's a pain, but I have, like many, acquired multiple email accounts for exactly this reason: spam avoidance. i use yahoo or hotmail, whatever...it's free, and if i start getting too much spam, i just get another account. i don't give out my "regular" email address(es) to anybody except friends and the like---people whom i know won't shower me with unsolicited and unwanted spam (as if there's a difference). it would be nice if there were an easier way--but i personally don't see any other solution unless you want to fight. and fighting spam is like fighting the birds in that hitchcock flick.
Not quite that simple if you take patents into account. While copyrights make room for individual creativity, patents do not. If you patent a process (such as Amazon.com's 1-click), then others, although they may have developed the process in an independently creative fashion, do not have rights to that process--unless, of course, these rights are obtained from the owner of the patent. Thus, a wholly separate and independent piece of software may be null and void under patent law if it performs the same function as patented software process.
Currently, as far as I know, this is only applicable to business processes (i.e., Priceline and Amazon.com's 1-click), but it seems to set the precedent for future software patents covering much more than merely "business" processes. As a software developer, the implications of this are a tad scary.