Re: A Little Linguistic Playground

On Thu, 25 Mar 1999, Lance Purple <lpurple[_at_]netcom.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

Another disadvantage to decopyrighting arises from the fact that there's no right of attribution in U.S. copyright law. Thus, a decopyrighter's expression could be repackaged and sold without credit. Here too, a license would seem preferable.

Jason Vogel
<jasonvogel[_at_]ibm.net> Received on Tue Mar 30 1999 - 05:43:15 GMT