xml-dev - RE: What Can One Do If...?

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

Fight them in court.  Copyrights have to be 
defended by the owner because it is only a 
right to make a copy.  The government agencies 
for collecting copyrights are registrars, not 
grantors or administrators of the right.  The 
right is granted on affixing the idea in a form. 
Registration is simply a way to invoke a known 
agency as a witness to a date of registration.  

If you publish ideas on the web or on a list, 
you have affixed it in a form.  You have also 
probably published it by that, yet defending the right may 
be costly.  My sincere advice, to quote Dr 
Newcomb, "do not put ANYTHING on the web 
that you do not want to be on the front page 
of the New York Times the following Sunday". 

It is up to you to defend a copyright.  Take some 
time to also understand the concept of fair use. 
These issues are very much complicated by the 
laissez faire reuse of information published on 
the web.  The recent settlement of the e-bay 
suit is very disturbing in that reuse is severely 
constrained and the power of the web to aggregate 
information into views is also.  On the other hand, 
the line between taking all of the prices on several 
auction sites and republishing them as an aggregate 
answer to a query, and taking a dozen songs off 
napster and selling them as bootleg CD is pretty 
thin except in an abstraction of natural associativity.

The web can be the neighbor's nasty dog that proves 
the power of good fences.

Len Bullard
Intergraph Public Safety
clbullar@ingr.com
http://fly.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/lensongs.ram

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h


-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Lauzon [mailto:xpl@fastmail.ca]
Sent: Wednesday, July 19, 2000 8:40 AM
To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
Subject: What Can One Do If...?


What can someone do, if someone steals your idea, writes the acronym 

the same way you do, and steals early code ideas, and then says he/she 

copyrighted it.  I am asking the XML-DEV mailing list, because my 

project is related to XML.  Simon St. Laurant will know what group I 

am talking about if he reads this, as he is on the list.