hide python code !

[Paul Boddie]

danielx wrote:
>
> But we have only considered the economics of such a decision. Even if
> there is no market value to a work, a person has an understandable
> desire to exercise the rights of ownership over a work, given the
> amount of personal investment one makes in producing it.

There are other motivations, too. An author might wish that their work
convey a particular message and that others should not be able to make
derived works which distort or contradict that message. However, there
are various established principles of fair use which limit the author's
control over such derived works.

[...]

> I think the above idea is frequently missed in discussions about
> copyrights/patents in the open source world. There, the focus seems to
> be on the marketability granted by protections (legal or physical). The
> post I am responding to illustrates this focus. Do we believe an author
> forfeits ownership of a work merely by sharing it? As a matter of
> conscience, I don't believe the answer can be imposed on anyone. Every
> person must answer this for him or herself.

As we've mentioned above, one crucial issue is control over published
works and over the potentially related works of others. With software,
such control is mediated by the licence which is often prominent, even
unavoidable when using proprietary software; thus, people using or
distributing software should be aware of the licence which applies to
the work. In contrast, works in areas such as popular music are not
prominently "labelled" with licensing information if you're listening
to that music playing on the radio, television, in a public space, and
so on. This apparent "promiscuity" with such works leads people to
believe that they are freely exchangeable and that the author is not
exercising control, even if that isn't really the case due to the
framework established by the recording industry for broadcasters.

So, people perceive an apparent lack of control as some kind of lack of
ownership, that the work has, by being shared in an apparently
unconditional way, become part of their common culture - a sentiment or
an understanding that can presumably be traced back throughout the
history of human culture itself. At the opposite end of the spectrum of
control, when mechanisms of control are used to restrict the
distribution of derived works or the production of coincidentally
related works, is it unfair that people wish to disregard such
apparently counter-intuitive mechanisms? An interesting example in
popular culture was the legal argument about whether silence
constitutes an original work
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/2133426.stm), but
things like patents affect the ability of others to create works in a
fashion that can be much harder to predict.

Paul