Stefan's headers [was:Names and identifiers]

[Peter J. Holzer]

On 2018-06-11 06:35:27 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote:
> Back in the 90s, my family sold books, many of them imported and/or
> exported. We had a few books by Earl Rodd, all looking like books and
> behaving like books. And we also had the "Rodd Papers", which are
> individual photocopied leaflets (A5, maybe 20-32 pages tops). They're
> also copyrightable, right? Well here's the thing. One of the books was
> simply a published compilation of a large number of the papers. So
> what is the "work"? Is the book a brand-new work? If you cease to
> register the papers and start registering the book (one work, not
> dozens, and also a new work so the stupid exponentiation resets),
> people can't copy the papers either, because they're entirely
> contained within the book.

But they can, because each of the papers is now public domain.

This situation also exists with current copyright law. If a book is out
of copyright (either because the author has been dead for 70 years or
because it fell through one of the gaps of the various copyright law
changes in the US), you can re-publish it. Now you do have the copyright
for the new book, but that stops others only from copying your book, not
the original.


> So... all you have to do is, every couple of years, gather everything
> you've ever written into a brand new book and register it.

That would be stupid. Fortunately the solution is obvious.


> >> >  * Every worthwhile creation is worth $1,000 for ten years.
> >>
> >> Not true by a long shot, and if you don't believe me, you can pay me
> >> $1000 right now for ten years' use of any of my free software.
> >
> > I think he meant it the other way around: If you can sell your software
> > for 10 years, you can affort $1000 to have your monopoly protected.
> 
> Except that I'm not selling it. What if I want to give it away, but
> with the proviso that the document credits me properly? "Go ahead, use
> it, publish it, but keep my name on it" is a common thing for people
> to request. And it's toothless [1] without copyright; so if you have
> to pay money for the right to be credited,

Depends on the details of the law. For example, in most of Europe there
is a difference between the "Urheberrecht" (creator's rights) and the
"Verwertungsrecht" (exploitation rights) (there are no exact equivalent
in English, so I'm using the German words). The former is always bound
to the person who created the work and cannot be sold. The latter can
(and usually is). The right of a person to be credited could be part of
the former. There is also much less incentive to pretend you wrote
something you didn't if there is no financial advantage, so it may not
be that important.

> there's going to be a lot of corporate bullying.

I don't really see why there would be more than now.

        hp

-- 
   _  | Peter J. Holzer    | we build much bigger, better disasters now
|_|_) |                    | because we have much more sophisticated
| |   | hjp at hjp.at         | management tools.
__/   | http://www.hjp.at/ | -- Ross Anderson <https://www.edge.org/>
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