[Eug-lug] Watching wmv files on Ubuntu

[Quentin Hartman]

On 5/21/07, marbux <marbux at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 5/21/07, Bob Crandell <bob at assuredcomp.com> wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 2007-05-20 at 17:48 -1000, marbux wrote:
> > I don't have a problem with copyrights if they are limited to 5 years or
> > less and are not renewable.  This gives the inventor some time to re
> > coop the cost of inventing and then gives everybody else a shot at it.
> >
> > You're right, patents, just say no.
> >
>
> Yes, copyrights would bother me a lot less if they were limited to a
> very short term. But I do think that regardless, we need to go back
> into an opt-in copyright system rather than the opt-out system we
> suddenly acquired 20 years ago.


How would you propose that this opt-in system be implemented? Surely not
through some sort of registry process. Not only could that be made
sufficiently difficult to effectively exclude small organizations and
individuals, but as the patent system has proven, there would be far too few
available resources to keep it maintained and valid.

I still think I favor the opt-out system, but the only workable opt-in
system I could imagine is one where a work simply had to have a copyright
notice attached to it to be copyrighted. It seems to me that a system like
that is only semantic nuance away from the current opt out system. I suppose
that at least disambiguates an unmarked work, but then how to handle "pre
revolution" works that are unmarked? It seems that this would create a whole
new class of abuses wherein a work could remove a mark from a work and
re-use it without the authors consent. When challenged, the infringer could
then claim that his copy was obtained without a mark and theuthor must have
made a mistake. In that case, the author would have little recourse.

In formulating my thoughts on this I almost convinced myself that you are
correct, but it still seems to me that the current opt out system gives
balances the rights of the authors vs. the public appropriately by
defaulting to the rights of the author. At least, they would if the terms
were reasonable at 5, maybe 10 years, ando/or were only assignable to
"natural citizens" (ie - not corporations ( I think I'm using that
correctly...))


The opt-out approach creates far more
> problems than it cures. E.g., try to find a web content editor
> click-through contributor license for a wiki that addresses the
> problem of republication via mirrors and RDF/XML syndication, and RSS
> syndication if there is a requirement of attribution. As though
> Wikipedia might feasibly syndicate the names of all people who
> contributed to any given page. In the Creative Commons set of
> licenses, we're back to the ground zero Non-attribution 1.0 license.
> So everyone kinds of shrugs and ignores copyrights. And the opt-out
> approach creates  those kinds of rats' nests all over the place.


It does create these sorts of ambiguities, but I think that these problems
_could_ be sufficiently addressed on the front end (by the click-thrus you
mention) if the issue were given sufficient thought. It still seems to me
that the opt-out system is the least of several evils, and goes the furthest
to protect authors without undue strain on anyone.

-- =

-Regards-

-Quentin Hartman-
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://euglug.org/pipermail/euglug/attachments/20070521/46c974f1/attac=
hment-0001.htm