abandonment of copyright [was] Re: Berne Convention -- copyright or author-right?

At 09:00 PM 4/6/2006, Joseph Pietro Riolo wrote:
>Lastly, I am not letting one out of 6,000,000,000 people to
>force me to retain my copyright when I don't want it.

Well, I have always thought it is impossible to just abandon your copyright like that, because so long as the public domain has been driven to extinction by the Sonny Bono Dark Ages, authors and their descendents inherit a perpetual responsibility to pay for cleanup costs in the intellectual landfills of the future. Isn't that the good side of the CTEA/SBDA?

You don't expect cyber-society to bear all those costs for disposing of (or otherwise rechanneling) junk ideation do you?

Suppose, borrowing a bit from plant law, I create an intellectual weed which while uncopyrighted, ends up disrupting the world's cognitive ecology. Might we so easily distance ourselves from the repercussions?

Alternatively, a copyrighted cognitive weed might be better (let us patent the process for its dissemination and invent a name "ThoughtWeed" and trademark that). We have, then, not only the right, but the responsibility to sue anyone found to engage in its propagation without our permission, hence ensuring that the author retains a vested interest in its future distribution, including liability for any incidental damage. [The preceding is, by the way, the one and only original ThoughtWeed and all other equivalent ideas are prohibited by shrinkwrap agreement. Any redistribution of ThoughtWeed signifies acceptance of this shrinkwrap agreement.]

Isn't that how IP law is supposed to work?

best regards,
DD [for each right, a responsibility...] Received on Sat Apr 08 2006 - 07:55:01 GMT