That is the major problem with local courts IMO. The small-time judges act as if they are god's and rulers of their domain.
You seem to be missing two important points.
One is that they really are rulers of their domain, small though it may be. We, the people, have through our elected representatives given judges broad latitude to judge. This includes the power to judge you in contempt of court. Rule of law is a pretty fabulous invention, and both the institution and the people who make it happen deserve respect.
The other? As a practical matter, both judges and cops are from necessity trained to keep things firmly under control. If at any point you act like you have the wrong idea about exactly who is in charge, they will come down on you like a ton of bricks.
On the other hand, if you're polite, respectful, and show some minor awareness of the fantastic amount of crap they put up with to keep civilization on the rails, you'll likely never have a problem.
The "third road" that is currently being explored is the road of running Virtual Machines on top of today's existing infrastructure. Java,.NET, and Mono are examples of the market attempting to find a way to combine modern technology with the tech of yesterday. Unfortunately, the results are less than stellar.
On the other hand, I think it's suckiness we can live with as long as price/performance ratios continue to improve. MAME is a fine example of this. Emulating all those weird old platforms isn't easy, but apparently it's a lot easier than porting that weird old code.
So I've never asked myself this, and I'm tempted to make this a separate ask-slashdot question, but why the heck is broadband so important? Most of all, why is it a federal government interest?
For the same reason that paved roads, telephone lines, reliable electric power, and international trade are. They're infrastructural enablers that help economic growth. And often the government has to get involved either to ensure equity, to lay down some regulatory framework to keep things sane, or because nobody else has the cojones or the funding to get things rolling initially.
That's the theory, of course. In practice it doesn't always work out so well. But overall, having lived in places with less functional governments, I'd say the US has done a reasonably good job.
Maybe its just me, but perhaps the Bush administration should focus on the US's literacy and mathematical skills compared to the rest of the globe, as opposed to our position in the world's broadband distribution.
Personally, I think the two are tightly related. There are a lot of reasons that Americans are relatively poorly educated, and the Internet's no magic bullet. But there's a lot you can do with the Internet to improve education. Unlike TV, which ended up a wasteland, there are already manygoodfreeeducationalresources. And anything that helps parents monitor their local schools strikes me as helpful in improving the system.
Well, that's great Kevin. Glad to see you're loosening rules in order to reward billion dollar companies
Hey, that's completely unfair. Billion-dollar companies get screwed like everybody else. The FCC only lets companies worth tens of billions of dollars do the screwing.
Nothing is free. Who will pay for it? You do not free power, water, gas, or place to live why free bandwidth.
And let me tell you, the coin-op streetlight outside my house is a great idea. Now it's only on when people really need it. And thank god they closed down that library. What a waste of taxpayer dollars when there's a bookstore right at the mall!
I'm not quite as happy with them changing 911 to a 900 number, or selling off the public parks, or the pay-per-view stoplights, but I know that a market economy is the only successful way to arrange things. I wouldn't want people to think I'm a communist, though, so I keep quiet about my gripes.
This whole love affair with snake oil really is an effect of the anti-rational, post-modern feel-good crap that at least some sizable minority of people in the West are buying into.
If modern medicine were truly rational, wouldn't its practitioners have done studies discovering that patient compliance with medical instructions is much higher when the patients feel good about it?
This works for now. However when everyone moves to it, it won't help at all. It is trivial for spammers to get around this - follow the standard. They don't bother now because most of their mail isn't being stopped by this trick. When it starts stopping a lot of email they will just implement that part of the standard and greylisting will become useless.
It's trivial for smart people people with good infrastructure to get around this. But there are an awful lot of spammers that are complete idiots working off of lashed-together infrastructure, half-assed open proxies, and poorly configured relays.
I think raising the technical bar on spammers is a workable strategy. Really good techies and businesspeople can already make good money with a lot less hassle and contempt than spammers get. I've seen a couple of providers here in San Francisco go spammy as they went downhill, and good techies couldn't get out the door fast enough.
BitTorrent in particular is good for huge legal files with huge demand peaks (e.g. new Linux distribution ISOs and it's good for large distributed bodies of files (like Furthur.net). [...] In your case, a website and HTTP distribution seems the best way to go, despite its unsexiness.
Another advantage of BitTorrent is that other people can easily join in to reduce your bandwidth costs.
When somebody recently a book via BitTorrent, I thought that was pretty cool, and wanted to help out. I joined all the torrents and have just left them running. If a favorite band were to release something this way, I'd do the same thing.
Regarding the Library of Congress, I think your idea has some practical problems. In particular, copyright is an international agreement, and your Library of Congress has no particular right to do whatever it wishes with Internet-based materials under international law.
The Internet's a new medium, and it wouldn't shock me that it would require revisions to international copyright treaties in the same way it will likely require changes to US copyright law. If it turns out that the Internet Archive, even under the wings of the LOC, requires treaty revisions, then I say we leave it up while we deal with the paperwork.
Do you really want to create a motivation for the rest of the world to disconnect the US from the Internet?
Well, given that the IA has been around for years without any notable international grumbling, I think this is pretty low down on my list of things to worry about. Are you seriously suggesting otherwise? Somehow I'm just not seeing Canadian troops pulling down microwave towers all along the borders because somebody is maintaining a public copy of things that once were public.
In particular, the presence of a work at a national reference library does not give near instant access to as many people as might want to read the work simultaneously. The Internet does. Just as P2P is the scourge of big media groups that tolerated copying the occasional videotape or CD, so an "electronic reference library" would render copyright inert for the entire Internet, and in doing so hit all the problems that copyright was intended to solve in the first place.
You seem to ignore that they're only storing things that were already put up for free, worldwide unrestricted access. The reason people freak out about an electronic reference library is that it substantially increases access to for-pay materials without any increasing compensation to the rightsholders. They (and you) are welcome to continue to be scared of that, but that has nothing to do with what the Internet Archive does.
Elsewhere you mention the case of somebody publishing a work for free to the world, then taking it down because they want to republish it for money. And further, when they tried, the Internet Archive refused to pull it from their collection, and most people just read it from the Internet Archive rather than paying. This is an interesting hypothetical case, but it strikes me as so unlikely and unimportant in practice that I can't bring myself to care. If it ever happens, and the people who are trying it don't look like complete idiots, drop back and let us know. I'll try to work up some sympathy then.
Since it isn't possible for one article to explain how to configure identification, authentication, and authorization for all systems, the article contained links to more information.
Even so, the article was really weak compared with the blurb that they submitted to Slashdot. At 650 words, the article is barely an introduction to the topic. The links were a minor plus, but the article didn't really fulfill the promise of the title, let alone that breathy 50-word blurb.
I would have been perfectly fine with the article if they had submitted it by saying, "LDAP has a neat history, and if you try it, you might learn something. But we won't tell you what or how, and we certainly won't show you how to solve any problems you actually have."
why shouldn't we be able to use it for non profit work?
You can. Just don't distribute it without permission. Don't like it? Tough. That's the law.
No, not "tough". The law gets changed every day. If the law is wrong, we should change it.
I agree that content creators should be able to reasonably profit from their works. But that's not even close to the issue in this case.
The real question raised in this case is not the straw men you seem to be addressing, but whether a corporation should be able to take something off the historical record because they find the truth inconvenient. The Internet Archive is as close as the internet has to the Library of Congress, and it makes no profit from its maintenance of what is pretty much universally seen as an important historical archive.
Just because YOU don't want it to, doesn't mean it copyright doesn't cover it.
Well, not exactly. But us not liking a provision in the law is the first step to changing it. "We the people", remember?
The libraries had permission to buy the papers and allow access to them in the first place. Internet Archive had no such agreement with this company.
What?
It's been a few years since I worked in a library, but last I knew a library can display or circulate anything they can get their hands on. They don't need any special agreement.
In fact, limiting the rights of others to distribute your works in order to encourage you to make them available is exactly what copyright is for, and this sort of case is a textbook example of why the principle matters.
Really?
I agree that content creators should have some limited rights that allow them to profit from their content, as that encourages the creation of more public content.
But in this case, nobody it saying that they wanted to publish this content later for profit. The plaintiffs intentionally made something public to the entire world, and went to some trouble and expense to do so. Now they want to pretend it never happened because the facts have become inconvenient.
What the Internet Archive does may or may not be technically legal, but it's certainly in harmony with the spirit of copyright law. When one publishes books, one is obliged to give a copy to the Library of Congress so that it remains on the permanent record.
Personally, I think the Library of Congress should just fund the Internet Archive and bless the project with their special powers of copyright exemption. Failing that, Congress should make legal this sort of non-profit archiving of public material. Copyright is the right to reasonable profit from your creative efforts, not the right to manipulate the historical record.
Half Life 2 proved that the public was willing to suffer major digital freedom loss to play a game.
Well, Valve's shennanigans around that game certainly hurt them some. The bitching about Steam was colossal.
And not realizing what bullshit they were up to, I tried borrowing a friend's copy some months after he was done with it to try out a new system. I spent for-fucking-ever installing it, another hour downloading updates, and then discovered that I COULDN'T PLAY THE GODDAMN GAME.
Had Valve treated me nicely, I would have been very willing to buy other games or add-ons through Steam. Had Half Life 2 kept my interest for more than a few days, I would have even bought my own copy. But after hours of frustration, I'd rather play Minesweeper than give them nickel.
So hopefully others will learn from their mistakes. People like to do business with companies that treat them well. Valve's uptight DRM stupidity convinced me they are not one of those companies.
Learning another typing layout doesn't make you lose your ability to type on a Qwerty keyboard anymore than learning German might make you forget how to speak English.
You sound like a guy who's never lived overseas.
A few months speaking only Spanish leaves me feeling toungue-tied in English. Even now, after years back in the US, I sometimes come to a complete halt when the only thing that occurs to me is a Spanish idiom without a good English match. From what I hear from exchange students and the like, this is a pretty common problem.
For me at least, it even happens with regional English variants. Living in Australia has permanently slowed down my spelling for a surprising number of words. And after years in California, I'll need surgery to get "dude" out of my vocabulary.
I've used Keyring on everything from old-school black-and-green Handsprings, to Treo 650s. It Just Works(tm). It is free. It is GPL'd.
Yep! I use it too, and love it. It's especially handy for those occasions when somebody calls you up about work you did a couple of years ago. Those passwords have long ago faded from my memory, but not from my Palm's memory.
So, if left in a bus terminal, chances are that the data will be gone before the hapless thief finds a charger for it to keep the RAM alive,
Note that this is not true for the Treo 650. They're using some sort of non-volatile RAM, so power loss doesn't erase the data anymore.
It's only one anecdotal data point, but it does suggest a simple fact of life. Success breeds arrogance whether a company is "evil empire" or seeks to "do no evil."
Hey, don't knock it. There are a number of elected politicians and talk show hosts that appear to be superfancy Elizas, and they are raking in the bucks.
The name of the game is "Façade", which is a french word that means "frontage" or "facing"
Yes, just like the artist formerly known as Prince's name is that goddamn symbol.
The word canyon was originally spelled cañon, naive was spelled naïve, and the thing with your employment history started out as a résumé. When we adopt a word into English, English orthography becomes acceptable. The game authors are welcome to try to be all stylishly faux-continental, but the rest of us are equally welcome to ignore them.
And this does not even begin to address the areas, as discussed in this topic, where works are created outside the "scope of employment" or under a contracting agreement or arrangement.
The point we were discussing starts in this post, where the poster was pretty clearly talking about something he did at work, while working a regular job, using his employer's computers, to speed his job along.
He seemed to think he was entitled to take the work with him because he felt he wasn't getting paid enough. Whatever the moral issues, the legal ones are pretty clear: it was a work for hire. Copyright does not in any way "auto-vest" to him, even if his employment contract mentions nothing about intellectual property.
I agree that a clever lawyer under weird circumstances might get a dubious judgement otherwise, but this is true about almost any legal issue, so I don't see it as relevant here. People punching a clock should not assume they can walk off with IP they've created on the job unless they have a clear written agreement to the contrary.
This is why savy people always spell out the copyright ownership issues around created works in WRITING, which was really the crux of my post.
I agree that this sort of thing should always be spelled out in writing. If you feel that was what you intended to communicate with your previous post, I'm glad to take your word for it, but that's not the impression I got from it.
Copyright auto-vests to the author, unless the contract specifically assigns it to the paying company. I believe the term of art is "works for hire."
That's mostly incorrect. For employees, the default is that the employer owns it. See Copyright Information Circular 9 for more details. As they say:
If a work is "made for hire," the employer, and not the employee, is considered the author. [...] The closer an employment relationship comes to regular, salaried employment, the more likely it is that a work created within the scope of that employment would be a work made for hire. However, since there is no precise standard for determining whether or not a work is made for hire under the first part of the definition, consultation with an attorney for legal advice may be advisable.
Slashdot Mirror
That is the major problem with local courts IMO. The small-time judges act as if they are god's and rulers of their domain.
You seem to be missing two important points.
One is that they really are rulers of their domain, small though it may be. We, the people, have through our elected representatives given judges broad latitude to judge. This includes the power to judge you in contempt of court. Rule of law is a pretty fabulous invention, and both the institution and the people who make it happen deserve respect.
The other? As a practical matter, both judges and cops are from necessity trained to keep things firmly under control. If at any point you act like you have the wrong idea about exactly who is in charge, they will come down on you like a ton of bricks.
On the other hand, if you're polite, respectful, and show some minor awareness of the fantastic amount of crap they put up with to keep civilization on the rails, you'll likely never have a problem.
The "third road" that is currently being explored is the road of running Virtual Machines on top of today's existing infrastructure. Java, .NET, and Mono are examples of the market attempting to find a way to combine modern technology with the tech of yesterday. Unfortunately, the results are less than stellar.
On the other hand, I think it's suckiness we can live with as long as price/performance ratios continue to improve. MAME is a fine example of this. Emulating all those weird old platforms isn't easy, but apparently it's a lot easier than porting that weird old code.
The cost to benefit might still be better in buying a commercial package
It might. But beware. If you don't have the source, then you'd better be doing something firmly within the envelope of what the designers expected.
So I've never asked myself this, and I'm tempted to make this a separate ask-slashdot question, but why the heck is broadband so important? Most of all, why is it a federal government interest?
For the same reason that paved roads, telephone lines, reliable electric power, and international trade are. They're infrastructural enablers that help economic growth. And often the government has to get involved either to ensure equity, to lay down some regulatory framework to keep things sane, or because nobody else has the cojones or the funding to get things rolling initially.
That's the theory, of course. In practice it doesn't always work out so well. But overall, having lived in places with less functional governments, I'd say the US has done a reasonably good job.
Maybe its just me, but perhaps the Bush administration should focus on the US's literacy and mathematical skills compared to the rest of the globe, as opposed to our position in the world's broadband distribution.
Personally, I think the two are tightly related. There are a lot of reasons that Americans are relatively poorly educated, and the Internet's no magic bullet. But there's a lot you can do with the Internet to improve education. Unlike TV, which ended up a wasteland, there are already many good free educational resources. And anything that helps parents monitor their local schools strikes me as helpful in improving the system.
Well, that's great Kevin. Glad to see you're loosening rules in order to reward billion dollar companies
Hey, that's completely unfair. Billion-dollar companies get screwed like everybody else. The FCC only lets companies worth tens of billions of dollars do the screwing.
Nothing is free. Who will pay for it? You do not free power, water, gas, or place to live why free bandwidth.
And let me tell you, the coin-op streetlight outside my house is a great idea. Now it's only on when people really need it. And thank god they closed down that library. What a waste of taxpayer dollars when there's a bookstore right at the mall!
I'm not quite as happy with them changing 911 to a 900 number, or selling off the public parks, or the pay-per-view stoplights, but I know that a market economy is the only successful way to arrange things. I wouldn't want people to think I'm a communist, though, so I keep quiet about my gripes.
This whole love affair with snake oil really is an effect of the anti-rational, post-modern feel-good crap that at least some sizable minority of people in the West are buying into.
If modern medicine were truly rational, wouldn't its practitioners have done studies discovering that patient compliance with medical instructions is much higher when the patients feel good about it?
This works for now. However when everyone moves to it, it won't help at all. It is trivial for spammers to get around this - follow the standard. They don't bother now because most of their mail isn't being stopped by this trick. When it starts stopping a lot of email they will just implement that part of the standard and greylisting will become useless.
It's trivial for smart people people with good infrastructure to get around this. But there are an awful lot of spammers that are complete idiots working off of lashed-together infrastructure, half-assed open proxies, and poorly configured relays.
I think raising the technical bar on spammers is a workable strategy. Really good techies and businesspeople can already make good money with a lot less hassle and contempt than spammers get. I've seen a couple of providers here in San Francisco go spammy as they went downhill, and good techies couldn't get out the door fast enough.
Yeash, what are they teaching you kids these days?
Says the guy who flunked Politeness 101.
They was actually these.
BitTorrent in particular is good for huge legal files with huge demand peaks (e.g. new Linux distribution ISOs and it's good for large distributed bodies of files (like Furthur.net). [...] In your case, a website and HTTP distribution seems the best way to go, despite its unsexiness.
Another advantage of BitTorrent is that other people can easily join in to reduce your bandwidth costs.
When somebody recently a book via BitTorrent, I thought that was pretty cool, and wanted to help out. I joined all the torrents and have just left them running. If a favorite band were to release something this way, I'd do the same thing.
Regarding the Library of Congress, I think your idea has some practical problems. In particular, copyright is an international agreement, and your Library of Congress has no particular right to do whatever it wishes with Internet-based materials under international law.
The Internet's a new medium, and it wouldn't shock me that it would require revisions to international copyright treaties in the same way it will likely require changes to US copyright law. If it turns out that the Internet Archive, even under the wings of the LOC, requires treaty revisions, then I say we leave it up while we deal with the paperwork.
Do you really want to create a motivation for the rest of the world to disconnect the US from the Internet?
Well, given that the IA has been around for years without any notable international grumbling, I think this is pretty low down on my list of things to worry about. Are you seriously suggesting otherwise? Somehow I'm just not seeing Canadian troops pulling down microwave towers all along the borders because somebody is maintaining a public copy of things that once were public.
In particular, the presence of a work at a national reference library does not give near instant access to as many people as might want to read the work simultaneously. The Internet does. Just as P2P is the scourge of big media groups that tolerated copying the occasional videotape or CD, so an "electronic reference library" would render copyright inert for the entire Internet, and in doing so hit all the problems that copyright was intended to solve in the first place.
You seem to ignore that they're only storing things that were already put up for free, worldwide unrestricted access. The reason people freak out about an electronic reference library is that it substantially increases access to for-pay materials without any increasing compensation to the rightsholders. They (and you) are welcome to continue to be scared of that, but that has nothing to do with what the Internet Archive does.
Elsewhere you mention the case of somebody publishing a work for free to the world, then taking it down because they want to republish it for money. And further, when they tried, the Internet Archive refused to pull it from their collection, and most people just read it from the Internet Archive rather than paying. This is an interesting hypothetical case, but it strikes me as so unlikely and unimportant in practice that I can't bring myself to care. If it ever happens, and the people who are trying it don't look like complete idiots, drop back and let us know. I'll try to work up some sympathy then.
Since it isn't possible for one article to explain how to configure identification, authentication, and authorization for all systems, the article contained links to more information.
Even so, the article was really weak compared with the blurb that they submitted to Slashdot. At 650 words, the article is barely an introduction to the topic. The links were a minor plus, but the article didn't really fulfill the promise of the title, let alone that breathy 50-word blurb.
I would have been perfectly fine with the article if they had submitted it by saying, "LDAP has a neat history, and if you try it, you might learn something. But we won't tell you what or how, and we certainly won't show you how to solve any problems you actually have."
No, not "tough". The law gets changed every day. If the law is wrong, we should change it.
I agree that content creators should be able to reasonably profit from their works. But that's not even close to the issue in this case.
The real question raised in this case is not the straw men you seem to be addressing, but whether a corporation should be able to take something off the historical record because they find the truth inconvenient. The Internet Archive is as close as the internet has to the Library of Congress, and it makes no profit from its maintenance of what is pretty much universally seen as an important historical archive.
Just because YOU don't want it to, doesn't mean it copyright doesn't cover it.
Well, not exactly. But us not liking a provision in the law is the first step to changing it. "We the people", remember?
The libraries had permission to buy the papers and allow access to them in the first place. Internet Archive had no such agreement with this company.
What?
It's been a few years since I worked in a library, but last I knew a library can display or circulate anything they can get their hands on. They don't need any special agreement.
In fact, limiting the rights of others to distribute your works in order to encourage you to make them available is exactly what copyright is for, and this sort of case is a textbook example of why the principle matters.
Really?
I agree that content creators should have some limited rights that allow them to profit from their content, as that encourages the creation of more public content.
But in this case, nobody it saying that they wanted to publish this content later for profit. The plaintiffs intentionally made something public to the entire world, and went to some trouble and expense to do so. Now they want to pretend it never happened because the facts have become inconvenient.
What the Internet Archive does may or may not be technically legal, but it's certainly in harmony with the spirit of copyright law. When one publishes books, one is obliged to give a copy to the Library of Congress so that it remains on the permanent record.
Personally, I think the Library of Congress should just fund the Internet Archive and bless the project with their special powers of copyright exemption. Failing that, Congress should make legal this sort of non-profit archiving of public material. Copyright is the right to reasonable profit from your creative efforts, not the right to manipulate the historical record.
Half Life 2 proved that the public was willing to suffer major digital freedom loss to play a game.
Well, Valve's shennanigans around that game certainly hurt them some. The bitching about Steam was colossal.
And not realizing what bullshit they were up to, I tried borrowing a friend's copy some months after he was done with it to try out a new system. I spent for-fucking-ever installing it, another hour downloading updates, and then discovered that I COULDN'T PLAY THE GODDAMN GAME.
Had Valve treated me nicely, I would have been very willing to buy other games or add-ons through Steam. Had Half Life 2 kept my interest for more than a few days, I would have even bought my own copy. But after hours of frustration, I'd rather play Minesweeper than give them nickel.
So hopefully others will learn from their mistakes. People like to do business with companies that treat them well. Valve's uptight DRM stupidity convinced me they are not one of those companies.
Learning another typing layout doesn't make you lose your ability to type on a Qwerty keyboard anymore than learning German might make you forget how to speak English.
You sound like a guy who's never lived overseas.
A few months speaking only Spanish leaves me feeling toungue-tied in English. Even now, after years back in the US, I sometimes come to a complete halt when the only thing that occurs to me is a Spanish idiom without a good English match. From what I hear from exchange students and the like, this is a pretty common problem.
For me at least, it even happens with regional English variants. Living in Australia has permanently slowed down my spelling for a surprising number of words. And after years in California, I'll need surgery to get "dude" out of my vocabulary.
I've used Keyring on everything from old-school black-and-green Handsprings, to Treo 650s. It Just Works(tm). It is free. It is GPL'd.
Yep! I use it too, and love it. It's especially handy for those occasions when somebody calls you up about work you did a couple of years ago. Those passwords have long ago faded from my memory, but not from my Palm's memory.
So, if left in a bus terminal, chances are that the data will be gone before the hapless thief finds a charger for it to keep the RAM alive,
Note that this is not true for the Treo 650. They're using some sort of non-volatile RAM, so power loss doesn't erase the data anymore.
It's only one anecdotal data point, but it does suggest a simple fact of life. Success breeds arrogance whether a company is "evil empire" or seeks to "do no evil."
There's even a medical term for the problem: Acquired Situational Narcissism. If Google were really smart, they'd hire somebody to come by and shake them up before they lose all touch with reality.
it sounds like a superfancy Eliza
Hey, don't knock it. There are a number of elected politicians and talk show hosts that appear to be superfancy Elizas, and they are raking in the bucks.
The name of the game is "Façade", which is a french word that means "frontage" or "facing"
Yes, just like the artist formerly known as Prince's name is that goddamn symbol.
The word canyon was originally spelled cañon, naive was spelled naïve, and the thing with your employment history started out as a résumé. When we adopt a word into English, English orthography becomes acceptable. The game authors are welcome to try to be all stylishly faux-continental, but the rest of us are equally welcome to ignore them.
And this does not even begin to address the areas, as discussed in this topic, where works are created outside the "scope of employment" or under a contracting agreement or arrangement.
The point we were discussing starts in this post, where the poster was pretty clearly talking about something he did at work, while working a regular job, using his employer's computers, to speed his job along.
He seemed to think he was entitled to take the work with him because he felt he wasn't getting paid enough. Whatever the moral issues, the legal ones are pretty clear: it was a work for hire. Copyright does not in any way "auto-vest" to him, even if his employment contract mentions nothing about intellectual property.
I agree that a clever lawyer under weird circumstances might get a dubious judgement otherwise, but this is true about almost any legal issue, so I don't see it as relevant here. People punching a clock should not assume they can walk off with IP they've created on the job unless they have a clear written agreement to the contrary.
This is why savy people always spell out the copyright ownership issues around created works in WRITING, which was really the crux of my post.
I agree that this sort of thing should always be spelled out in writing. If you feel that was what you intended to communicate with your previous post, I'm glad to take your word for it, but that's not the impression I got from it.
That's mostly incorrect. For employees, the default is that the employer owns it. See Copyright Information Circular 9 for more details. As they say: