Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Where's the line??
Author: Chris Hanson Posted: 9/2/1999; 9:09:43 PM Topic: Who owns what parts of your webpage? Msg #: 10488 (In response to 10483) Prev/Next: 10487 / 10489
Dennis Peterson wrote:2) We replace the whole idea of copyright with some other model that lets us still get credit and pay, but that is fitted to the new realities of our technology. Instead of seeing the ability to instantly copy, deeplink, summarize, etc. as problems which we attempt to limit, we see them as advantages which we encourage.If you leave "copy" out of the list above, this is already how copyright is (as I understand it). In fact, I think we should roll copyright law back 50 years or so, so that it only lasts 25 years beyond the death of the original creator of a work.
Copyright can't and shouldn't affect your ability to refer to a work. You can't tell libraries that they can't put a Dewey Decimal number on a book you wrote. And you can't tell me that I can't put a link to your message on my web site.
Copyright can't and shouldn't affect your ability to summarize a work. Robert Heinlein's estate can't tell me whether I'm allowed to say "Stranger in a Strange Land was about a human raised by Martians returning to Earth." And Major Lague Baseball can't tell me not to tell my friends the score from a Cubs game.
All of this can be modified in the face of explicit contracts, of course. Implict contracts, on the other hand...
(I am not a lawyer. Just rather opinionated.)
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