On Sun, Mar 27, 2005 at 06:08:08PM -0800, Sean Kellogg wrote: > Its not so much that copyright is pro-corporate as has been said (although it > is), its that copyright won't assume anything about your behavior. <...> > Copyright assumes you retain any right you don't explicitly > grant... so you have to explicitly relinquish everything. That would be one of the primary ways in which it is acutely pro-corporate and pro-lawyer. > To be honest, I'm not entirely sure you can truly put anything into the public > domain until the term of copyright has expired. This varies with jurisdiction. > All that being said, Creative Commons are smart people and write good stuff. > I think you can trust them. I don't. They have been acutely US-centric to date, and they write bad stuff. Also, some of them are lawyers. Any lawyer who is not your lawyer is acutely untrustworthy; they are acting in the best interests of somebody other than you. Trusting them is foolish, especially when you don't know who that person is. They are under no obligation to treat you fairly or tell you the truth, and they may be under obligation to lie to you outright. They have a notion of 'professional conduct', and it is not congruent with any conventional definition of 'honourable conduct' - in many respects, it is the opposite. > To be certain you have no legal responsibility > to ensure it benefits the public. There is no enforceable right or party to > enforce the right. This is not true in all jurisdictions. Notably it's not true in the UK. Pro-consumer laws have strange and interesting effects when applied to free software. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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