Howdy all,
The Question Copyright folks are launching a new effort around the
chilling effect of copyright: specifically, the effect of works where
the only thing stopping the work getting out is the cloud of copyright
questions.
They use the term "Ghost Works" for these never-made or never-released
works <URL:http://questioncopyright.org/ghost_works_survey>:
In the article "Seen Any Ghost Works Lately?", we defined a ghost
work as a creative work that never got made, or was made but not
released, because copyright concerns prevented it from being
started or from being distributed. Since then, informal
conversations with artists, publishers and others have made it
very clear that such suppression is a common event, much more
common than most people think. But the public rarely hears about
it, because no one does publicity for a work that doesn't exist.
The purpose of the Ghost Works Survey is twofold: to demonstrate
the scope and scale of this phenomenon by gathering and
organizing as much data about it as we can, and to highlight
compelling individual stories of artists and other creators who
had their work thwarted by copyright restrictions. The survey
will not attempt to catalogue every ghost work — there are
likely far too many, given that almost every artist we've talked
to so far has a story of a work they had to alter or lay aside
due to copyright concerns. Rather, we'll focus on qualitative
results: we want to collect enough stories to discern large-scale
patterns, so we can understand and publicize the effects of
copyright suppression. For more information, see the projects
page.
--
\ "I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then |
`\ I thought 'Why should I? He never reads any of mine.'" -- |
_o__) Spike Milligan |
Ben Finney
Hello,
I stumbled across this odd article: "All OSS Developers Are Equal, But
Some OSS Developers Are More Equal Than Others!" [1] where the FSF is
criticized for being unfair to software developers and failed to close
the "ASP Loophole".
For the authors of this article, the Affero GPL does not fix the
problem, because "GPL developers won't use it". Well, if so, why
should they switch to any other licence that addresses the problem?
And the accusation of unfairness goes in the same direction. They
blame the FSF to aggressively sue software developers who don't
provide the source code in their distribution, but don't sue google
for benefiting from Free Software without showing their sources.
I don't really see what they want to tell me beside that the FSF is
just a bunch of "extremists" who "deny the value of intellectual
property rights."
I am contemplating to write them, but it's probably not worth it. What
do you think?
[1] http://www.metrocorpcounsel.com/current.php?artType=view&artMonth=May&artYe…