Re: Owning a piece of my mind

[Anders Andersson <andersa@algonet.se>]

Geoffrey Dutton <dutton@spatial-effects.com> wrote:
>This is like, but not the same as Ted Nelson's vision of a hypertext future
>in which all authors linked to a document would be recognized and
>automatically compensated for their portions as copyright holders. It
>disturbs me not because I would object to sharing labor and credit for my
>creative work with electronic entities, but because we would be working to
>enrich corporations far beyond the costs of their actual efforts to deploy
>the technology, literally giving them a piece of my mind -- to own.

I doubt the software developers would use this to tax the work of
their individual customers in general, since collecting license
fees would be an administrative nightmare even _with_ automated
systems such as Ted Nelson's version of hypertext, and the users
would rebel against such fees fairly quickly by switching to other
software vendors.

However, the software industry may wish to hold on to such a legal
bone for formal reasons, issue "free licenses" to everybody to use
their work in pretty much the same way as before so that few users
will even become aware of the legal implications, and invoke the
presumed "contributory software rights" only when necessary in a
few special cases, say when somebody uses Microsoft's spellchecker
to write a hateful poem about Bill Gates with a lot of hard-spelled
words in it.

Compare it to the way lawyers argue that you need their license in
order to copy their software from their web site to your hard disk,
or from your hard disk to your primary memory before execution.
Do they ever charge you for that?  They still claim that you are
bound by a license, and they may decide to revoke that license in
the future.  I find it questionable to invoke copyright law when it
comes to copying that is not supposed to benefit third parties, but
is necessary for technical reasons, and is normally permitted by
the copyright holder anyway.  It makes for "submarine rights", much
like the "submarine patents" that have been discussed before; they
are spread out as far and wide as possible, to be invoked only if
and when they become financially useful.

There are cases when the authors of the software tool in effect
contribute to the work of the software user in a more direct way,
such as when significant portions of a generic software library are
included in the executable binary produced by the linker, and those
cases may require reasonably worded licenses such as the GNU LGPL.

Giving credit to the software author for helping you write a poem
may be like giving credit to the photographer for helping you make
a movie, but it may also be like giving credit to the electricians
for that same movie.  How do their creative talents contribute to
and influence the final work?  "Good voltage artwork there, Lucas!"

--
Anders Andersson