Copyright Digression (Was: Re: [tlug] linux in Japanese schools)

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

This is actually a bit of a digression on copyright-related stuff; I'm
not sure yet how relevant it even is to the GNU licence discussion, on
which recent posts I am still contemplating. I do sense some potential
confusion here between copyright and licensing.

On Sun, 7 Jan 2007, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:

> Plus it is extremely difficult to actually _put_ something in
> the public domain since _any_ intellectual work is considered to
> automatically generate copyright.

As far as I can tell, it's dead easy. You, as creator of the work,
simply announce that you have put it into the public domain, and it's
done.

Is there something in the Berne convention or perhaps particular
countries' copyright laws that invalidates this?

> Public domain works have no restriction whatsoever for use. Plagiarism
> cannot be punished. Other abuses can't either.

Let's be careful with the word "abuse." I've put plenty of software into
the public domain, and I did it knowing full well what I was doing. If
someone goes and changes one character in one of these programs, claims
copyright on this derivitave work, offers for sale compiled versions
of this software for an enormous amount, does not make source code
available, and hides the facts that I wrote the original work and the
original work is available in source form for free, some people would
consider that to be abuse. However, that's not abuse; that's using the
software with the freedom I wanted to give to people.

> Although that needs to be tested in courts, it would be technically
> possible to put a new copyright on a public domain work (partial or
> total) since nobody protects the non-existing original copyright.

Again, I believe it would not. Two things lead me to believe this:

    a) I do not think it's possible to claim copyright on a work where
    you were not the creator and a copyright owner did not assign the
    copyright to you. On what basis would you claim you own the work?

    b) If this could be done, someone could have and almost certainly
    would have run out and claimed copyright not only on all of
    Shakespeare's plays, but on various older editions of the Bible
    (such as the King James), and made a heck of a lot of money. (The
    Bible is by far the best-selling book in the United States.)

> On the other side, any distributed "intellectual activity" can be
> considered as copyrighted work and is basically protected by copyright
> law.

References? I understood copyright law to protect only works in some
realized form. So an e-mail message could be protected, but not any old
"activity."

> Even what you and I write here is. Depending on the work, it is
> either protected by basic copyright law only, or by copyright law plus
> licensing agreements.

Why does this depend on the work, and how? The Berne convention and
national laws that follow it indicate that an author is automatically
granted copyright to the works he produces, but I don't see how
licensing agreements would come into it at all unless the copyright
owner explicitly created such agreements and licensed the work under
them.

cjs
--
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974