Re: A Little Linguistic Playground

On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, Jason Vogel <jasonvogel[_at_]ibm.net> writes:
>
> The thing I can't understand about this whole "decopyright"
> conversation is why anyone would want to do it. It seems to me that
> by abandoning your copyright you would enable others to repackage
> and sell the very expression you intended to be freely available.

If the works are freely available, then of course anyone can try to charge money for them. Dover Books already charges money for copies of public domain works; at the same time that Project Gutenberg is giving them away for free. I don't see why a "decopyrighter" would object to this.

> The Microstar v. Formgen case comes to mind. A better approach, as
> others have mentioned, might be to license your work to the public
> for clearly defined noncommercial uses. But it's unclear to me
> whether you can have privity with the public at large in the absence
> of some kind of clickwrap agreement.

But licenses can be revoked; the point of "decopyrighting" would be to prevent any future restrictions on copying the work; even if your great grandkids (or the guy who won a lawsuit against them) decide in 2055 that they want it to not be free anymore. It wouldn't help to transfer the rights to sort of charitable trust, since they could be sued and forced to transfer the rights back again. There needs to be a way to destroy the rights forever.

So what's really needed is a new section of USC 107, to explicitly state that copyright holders have the power to put their own work into the public domain before the expiration date.

Lance Purple
<lpurple[_at_]netcom.com> Received on Fri Mar 26 1999 - 00:10:53 GMT