Re: [OT] Droit d'auteur vs. free software?
* Steve Langasek <vorlon@netexpress.net> [030512 20:42]:
> > That's why the law has the extra provision that helps me protect my
> > moral rights.
>
> It has a superfluous provision that unnecessarily restricts the author's
> freedom to form contracts. It is as idiotic and misguided as the
> attempts to criminalize the circumvention of technological safeguards in
> the US.
It's assumed to be a right. Basic thing about rights (at least in German
law, as far as I understand it) is that rights cannot be transfered.
You can not tranfer your right to vote, your right to not be hurt nor
any other right. Even your "copyright" can not be sold. The German
analogon to a tranfer of copyright is a exclusive licence.
> > The author always retains the right to object to mutilations
> > of the work. It's his natural right.
>
> What a funny use of the term "natural" right.
Natural is a quite common description for something seen as so
evident, that it needs no justification. So one can argue, if it
is a natural right, but after I saw people pretending a right to
own weapons this one is not funny at all.
> I can think of plenty of more effective ways to prevent authors from
> being *forced* to accept unconditional surrender of their works.
> Providing authors with a better education when it comes to contract law,
> for example, or promulgating alternate vectors for the publication of
> works that don't involve currently-standard copyright contract terms.
I think the direct and natural way to avoid damnifing contracts is to make
them void. Laws need to be enforceable to be useful.
Though German law is often broken and tends to become more so due to
corporation lobiism, some aspects are still nice. I like a system making
warrenty statements void at all, that restricts warenty to much or
doing such bubbling as "as permitted by applicable law".
Hochachtungsvoll,
Bernhard R. Link
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Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing
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