I'm an author. I'm against copyright. I'm in
favour of authors' rights for actual humans,
for the reasons set out in the US Constitution - and because it seems to me that having individual
authors taking responsibility would do something
positive for the quality of publishing (etc).
Publishers are welcome to *license* these rights,
but they stay with the author. Problem of
unobtainable works pretty much solved.
Fantasy? In fact, this is the essence of the
law in Europe (except UK & IE), Japan... most
of the world. One effect, for example: French
TV news says who was responsible for each report
in a subtitle, because they have to. Authors
not only have the right to license their work,
but the right to be credited and the right to
object if it's manipulated (in a way that
damages their reputation). Those are the
moral rights that just barely exist in US law.
Since this is/. I'll relate the issue to code.
Sorry, authors weren't paying attention when
copyright on computer code was legislated. Imagine
it had been done on the same basis as books and
movies in France. Every time you saw a BSOD, it'd
come with the names of the people responsible.
Under authors' rights the GPL (et al) would be
a lot shorter and sweeter, because as you can
see by now it'd be going with the grain. And MS code would be the property of the coders...
Remember, too, that the EU has just codified
parts of "fair use" - if a work is protected by
encryption or whatever, there must a way round that for libraries and archives, people
with disabilities and a fairly long list of
other uses.
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I'm an author. I'm against copyright. I'm in favour of authors' rights for actual humans, for the reasons set out in the US Constitution - and because it seems to me that having individual authors taking responsibility would do something positive for the quality of publishing (etc). Publishers are welcome to *license* these rights, but they stay with the author. Problem of unobtainable works pretty much solved.
Fantasy? In fact, this is the essence of the law in Europe (except UK & IE), Japan... most of the world. One effect, for example: French TV news says who was responsible for each report in a subtitle, because they have to. Authors not only have the right to license their work, but the right to be credited and the right to object if it's manipulated (in a way that damages their reputation). Those are the moral rights that just barely exist in US law.
Since this is /. I'll relate the issue to code.
Sorry, authors weren't paying attention when
copyright on computer code was legislated. Imagine
it had been done on the same basis as books and
movies in France. Every time you saw a BSOD, it'd
come with the names of the people responsible.
Under authors' rights the GPL (et al) would be
a lot shorter and sweeter, because as you can
see by now it'd be going with the grain. And MS code would be the property of the coders...
Remember, too, that the EU has just codified parts of "fair use" - if a work is protected by encryption or whatever, there must a way round that for libraries and archives, people with disabilities and a fairly long list of other uses.