On Fri, 13 Aug 2010 02:26:41 am Rugxulo wrote:
It may be true that now all work is by default copyrighted. I'm not even sure you can PD software in some countries (ugh). But most important is the original author(s)' intent.
That is possibly the LEAST important factor. What the original author wants doesn't matter. What matters is what the current copyright holder thinks, and what the law says.
If they don't care, nobody else will. It's not worth arguing over their "rights" when they don't care anymore (or never did).
That's simply not true. What happens when the author dies, and his heirs inherit ownership of the copyrighted work? What guarantee do you have that they will be as easy-going with regard to copyright as the original owner? Without a licence from the original author, this becomes a clear and obvious case of infringement.
What happens if the work was written under the auspices of a university, which in 1972 was quite happy to let the author publish without a copyright notice, but in 2010 discover that under the terms of their employment contract at the time, they actually own the copyright, not the author?
Or what happens if responsibility for enforcing copyright is separate from the creative act? You can have a situation where the left hand is explicitly encouraging people to use copyrighted material, while the right hand is threatening those same people for infringement. A recent case, where the Discovery Channel's marketing department provided promotional material to a fan website, and the legal department then threatened them with a lawsuit and forced the owner to hand over ownership of the domain:
http://blog.mx510.com/2010/08/10/discovery-threatens-fan-site-it-also-promot...
Don't imagine for one second that this is unique. I've even seen cases where the marketing department of a record label uploaded videos to YouTube, and the legal department then made DMCA claims and had their own videos removed. (I can't find the link right now, sorry.)
I note that you made a quip:
You know what they say about "assume".
and then immediately go on to advise us to assume that the absence of an explicit prohibition against copying a work is the same as permission to copy. That's terribly irresponsible. Under copyright law, it works the other way: in the absence of explicit permission, you are legally required to assume the prohibition stands.