On Sat, Dec 02, 2000 at 04:52:35PM -0700, John Galt wrote: > > You're thinking of patents, not copyrights. Under US law, copyrights > > persist until they expire (now 75 years if held by a natural person, 95 > > years if held by a corporation) or are affirmatively abandoned.. > > Acvtually, I was thinking trademarks: Yes, and I committed the old error of fucking up while correcting your fuckup. I meant trademarks as well. > Kleenex for the prime example. The big issue is collateral estoppel. If > there is collateral estoppel in copyright law, failure to prosecute > infringement may disallow you from ever prosecuting the same type of > infringement again. I don't think collateral estoppel works this way, unless all copyright infringers are somehow construed as part of the same class and sued that way. A few years ago that kind of reasoning would have been considered a joke, but the California DVD CCA lawsuit looks strikingly close to this. However, I do not think Di$ney, Time Warner, etc., who bought and paid for the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension act, are going to permit the laws in this country from be construed so as to estop them from litigating against copyright infringer A simply because they didn't litigate against infringer B. Let's keep in mind that RMS/the FSF and Debian are pretty much on the same side of the fence in this big war. I would not at all be opposed to including licensing information in a separate meta-data tarball inside .debs. -- G. Branden Robinson | Damnit, we're all going to die; let's Debian GNU/Linux | die doing something *useful*! branden@debian.org | -- Hal Clement, on comments that space http://www.debian.org/~branden/ | exploration is dangerous
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