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[danielx]

Paul Boddie wrote:
> 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

While I agree with most of your post, I think the point should be made
that eula's don't hold up very well in US courts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EULA#Enforceability

> 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

Extremely interesting point! This should really motivate people to
answer the question I posed earlier: Does an author of software forfeit
his rights to the code if he shares his program (ie, reliquishes
_complete_ protection over the code)?

Let's say this happens: I want to sell some software, but I'm affraid
people will just copy it. So I prototype it in Python (or whatever
programming language) and never release the program. Based on that, I
design a chip (I know this is nearly impossible, but we are doing a
mental experiment), which does exactly the same thing.

First of all, the chip can be reverse engineered (of course, with MUCH
greater difficulty than the equivalent code). Should I still be worried
that my invention will be copied?

A second point to consider: The chip is patentable (I think this is the
case legally, as well as in the court of public opinion), so what about
the equivalent code?

> 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