Re: Not "Satanism;" realism.

[Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>]

At 09:52 PM 1/1/99 -0500, James LewisMoss wrote:
 
>The framers of the constitution didn't consider intellectual property.

They sure did. They recognized that works of authorship and inventions
were valuable; that's why they took steps to encourage them.

>Copyright law was created to encourage people to create things.  

True.

>There is no inherent right to your thoughts or words.  Sorry if you have
>this mistaken impression.  

I'm sorry, too, because you're dead wrong. The products of our creativity
are, in fact, our most valuable possessions.

>At the moment copyright law is 
>being subverted by a bunch of people who think that people have an
>inherent right to their thoughts and words by extending the copyright
>protection indefinitely.  

You characterize the problem incorrectly. The real problem is that
corporations, which are "fictional persons," are attempting to
assume the rights of real persons -- and then some. Since corporations 
don't have a limited lifespan, as people do, the flow of deceased 
authors' works into the public domain is impaired. This, however,
does not mean that authors do not or should not have fundamental
rights. They do.

>This was NOT the original intention.  The
>original intention was the all works would pass into the public domain 
>eventually to create a better public good.  GPL just skips that
>waiting time and does it immediately.

Not true. Works published under the GPL are *not* in the public domain,
and in fact it is intentionally unclear when -- if ever -- they DO
pass into the public domain, because there may be many undisclosed
authors. What's more, if the rights to a GPLed program are held by
a corporation, that corporation may be able to manipulate things such
that the program is never truly in the public domain.

This is another strong argument for the BSD-style license, in which
the author truly DOES make the program usable by anyone without
onerous resrictions.

--Brett Glass