Douglas Tutty wrote:
On Tue, Dec 05, 2006 at 03:03:53PM -0700, Nate Duehr wrote:Thus, copyright in the real world only matters if the author chooses to exercise it.Since copywrite exists unless released within a licence, who would want to open themselves (or their company) to the risk of a legal battle, or tarnishing of a reputation.
Their view of the real risks are skewed then. Ask any company who's put GPL'ed code inside a product and gotten away with it because no one could tell it was there. You naive enough to think that hasn't, and isn't happening daily? Do those people give a whit about the license or the Copyright? Nope. Do they just have a copy of the code. Yep.
You (as copyright holder) have to prove they're using your code. (Re: SCO.) You can't prove it, then what good did your automatic Copyright do for you? Absolutely nothing.
By your definition, you could have hit reply with quoting turned on in your MUA to my code example I sent -- and then you would have been a law breaker!No. The forums are clearly stated on the web-site (not just assumed by the culture) that they and anything posted to them are public. This releases the rest of us from liability if we redistribute your code.
Where? What forum? This is a mailing list you can sign up for without ever seeing a web page.
I could start sprinkling code into my signature line and then sue everyone who quotes it on a mailing list? Yeah, right. It'd actually be fun to see someone try that and see how far it got in the legal system.You obviously don't agree with automatic copyright. However, to change it you would have to change international law.
I have no beef with automatic Copyright, I just claim it's useless. Can you find any case law where automatic Copyright has been invoked?
Try releasing something into public and then trying to regain your Copyright in a couple of years if it gets wildly popular just because you changed your mind. Won't happen. Most Judges just aren't that stupid.
Nate