[OT] Copyright statements and why they can be useful (was: Everything you did not want to know about Unicode in Python 3)

[Ben Finney]

Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> writes:

> On Tue, 13 May 2014 14:42:51 +0000, alister wrote:
>
> > You do not need any statements at all, copyright is automaticly
> > assigned to anything you create (at least that is the case in UK
> > Law) although proving the creation date my be difficult.
>
> (1) In my lifetime, that wasn't always the case. Up until the 1970s or 
> thereabouts, you had to explicitly register anything you wanted 
> copyrighted […]

> (2) You don't have to just prove copyright. You also have to *identify* 
> who the work is copyrighted by, and it needs to be an identifiable legal 
> person (actual person or corporation), not necessarily the author. […]

(3) In all jurisdictions where copyright exists, the copyright holder
nominally has monopoly on the work for only a fixed term, starting from
the date of publication. To know when the copyright will expire, it's
essential to know the date from which copyright starts; this is best
done explicitly in the copyright statement.

I say “nominally”, because another alarming and unilateral trend is to
dramatically extend the nominally fixed term, and to strong-arm national
governments with terade deals to maximise the copyright term around the
world.

The effect, as Lawrence Lessig points out:

    The meaning of this pattern is absolutely clear to those who pay to
    produce it. The meaning is: No one can do to the Disney Corporation
    what Walt Disney did to the Brothers Grimm. That though we had a
    culture where people could take and build upon what went before,
    that's over. There is no such thing as the public domain in the
    minds of those who have produced these 11 extensions these last 40
    years because now culture is owned.

    <URL:http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2002/08/15/lessig.html>

Or, less poetically, since the term of copyright is only nominally
fixed, and in practice just keeps getting extended by newly-lobbied
legislation every twenty years or so, the copyright maximalists have
de facto instituted “perpetual copyright on the installment plan”
<URL:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_copyright>.

Nevertheless, copyright on works created this century will in principle
expire at some date in the future; and to know when that date will be,
we need to know when the copyright began. Hence the need for explicit
copyright statements saying the date of publication.

<URL:http://questioncopyright.org/>

-- 
 \            “[T]he great menace to progress is not ignorance but the |
  `\           illusion of knowledge.” —Daniel J. Boorstin, historian, |
_o__)                                                        1914–2004 |
Ben Finney