[sdiy] A useful distinction

[Amos]

Jay and others -

there are of course entire libraries devoted to copyright and intellectual
property laws, which can answer these questions in finer detail than we can
likely imagine.

As I understand it, the spirit of the law has always been and remains along
these lines:

a person's intellectual property ought to be protected for their exclusive
benefit for a period of time, in order to reward the the author for his or
her work, and by extension to encourage continued innovation and progress as
a whole. At the same time, there should be some reasonable point after which
the ideas become the common heritage of humanity and should be available to
all.

Right now I think that a lot of intellectual property belongs to the author
(or their estate) for the author's lifetime plus fifty years. There have
been some recent changes and this may not be universal, but it's the kind of
timeframe we're talking about. So, Mark Twain is public domain, Homer
(assuming there was such an individual) has been common property for
millenia, but Thomas Henry's work is still his own.



On 10/13/05, Jay <synthbaron at tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
>
> Aaron Lanterman wrote:
> >
> > Ah, the "selling" is a key word:
> >
> > 1) Making a copy of anything, in print or not, and _selling it_ without
> > permission from and providing compensation to the author
> >
> > is very different than
> >
> > 2) Making a copy of an out-of-print book for personal use
> >
> > One might argue about (2), but (1) is clearly evil.
> >
> > - Aaron
>
> At what point does #1 stop being evil? Should a publisher be paying Mark
> Twain's descendants?
>
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