Re: public domain
On Monday 28 March 2005 12:03 pm, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> 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.
The US-centric critiques have been addressed[1]. If there are further
concerns those should be brought to light in the appropriate public forum so
that CC can address them. Legal professional ethics codes are far more
complex and comprehensive that I think you believe, demonstrated by the fact
that you believe a lawyer can be under an obligation to lie (at best they can
be obligated to omit, and even then you can get in trouble). And what do UK
pro-consumer licenses have to do with a copyright license? Perhaps if we are
talking about software as a product... but this is documentation and we are
talking about copyrights, so our only concern is expression and whether that
expression is allowed or not, not products liability issue.
The law is both complex and subtle, such broad bush strokes both hurt your
underlying argument and cloud the truth.
-Sean
[1] http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/002449.shtml
--
Sean Kellogg
2nd Year - University of Washington School of Law
GPSS Senator - Student Bar Association
Editor-at-Large - National ACS Blog [http://www.acsblog.org]
So, let go
...Jump in
...Oh well, what you waiting for?
...it's all right
...'Cause there's beauty in the breakdown
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