Best way to protect my new commercial software.

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:04:29 +0000, Grant Edwards wrote:

> On 2007-12-18, Jan Claeys <usenet at janc.be> wrote:
>> Op Fri, 14 Dec 2007 16:54:35 +0000, schreef Grant Edwards:
>>
>>> Uh what?  I don't know what country you're in, but in the US, it
>>> doesn't take any time at all to copyright something.  The mere act of
>>> writing something copyrights it.  I thought it was the same in Europe
>>> as well.
>>
>> No, it's only copyrighted when you _publish_ it.
> 
> Interesting.  So, in Europe, if somebody steals something you wrote
> before you get it published, they're free to do with it as they please?

Please do not conflate theft and copyright infringement, or theft and 
plagiarism. They are very different concepts, and confusing them does not 
help.


> I'm glad it doesn't work that way here in the US.  Over here, something
> is copyrighted as soon as it's written (actually I think the phrase is
> "fixed in a medium" or something like that).

I'm not glad at all. The Change from an "everything is uncopyrighted 
unless explicitly copyrighted" model to a "everything is copyrighted 
unless explicitly exempted" model was only one of many deleterious 
changes to copyright law over the last half century or so.

It means the merest throw-away scribble on a napkin has equal protection 
to the opus an author slaved over for thirty years (although in fairness 
you are unlikely to win a copyright case over the words "Meet me at the 
bar" scribbled on a napkin then tossed in a rubbish bin... *wink*). It 
means that there is a serious problem of "orphan works", where rare and 
valuable films from the 1920s and earlier are rapidly decaying into an 
unusable powder because nobody dares copy them lest the unknown copyright 
owners descend like vultures and sue you for copyright infringement 
*after* you've done the hard work of restoring our cultural heritage.

(Although the orphan works problem is at least equally as much a problem 
of excessively long copyrights as it is to do with automatic copyright.)

I dare say that European countries which have had automatic copyright 
longer than the US have seen far more of their national heritage (early 
film, photographs and the like) rot away.

Discussions of copyright so often focus on protecting the author's 
privileges and ignore the opportunity costs of locking up works. When 
works needed to be explicitly copyrighted, something of the order of just 
ONE PERCENT of authors bothered to copyright their published works -- and 
just one percent of them bothered to renew it for a second 14 year term. 
That gives you an idea of how valuable copyright really is. For every 
Mickey Mouse, there are 100,000 or more works that don't have enough 
economic value to the creator to bother protecting -- but they're part of 
our cultural heritage, and maybe somebody else could build on top of it, 
like Disney built their empire on other folks' uncopyrighted stories and 
ideas. Even Mickey Mouse himself got his start in a derivative work of 
Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr.

This newsgroup is a perfect example of the fraud that is the idea of 
copyright. Every single post sent to the newsgroup is copyrighted, and 
yet they invariable have no economic value to the author. If they have 
any economic value, it is to the readers -- but they don't pay for it, 
and we authors don't ask for payment. In principle, anyone who forwards 
on something they read here, or uses a code snippet in their own work, is 
infringing copyright. We don't need copyright to encourage us to create 
works of this nature, and in fact this newsgroup can only exist by 
pretending copyright doesn't exist -- there are informal conventions that 
unless somebody explicitly states otherwise, any reader can forward on 
posts, copy and reuse code, and so forth.

(Disclaimer: for the avoidance of all doubt, I'm not suggesting that ALL 
creative works should be uncopyrighted, or that no creative works benefit 
from the encouragement of copyright.)



-- 
Steven