[vox-tech] Copyright and license

[Richard S. Crawford]

On Sunday 23 January 2005 13:02, Peter Jay Salzman flailed at a keyboard and 
produced this:
> Suppose someone writes a useful document.  They put a copyright notice onto
> the document, but no license.  They put it on the web, for free, and it
> stays there for years.  At some point I download a copy of that document.
> The *intention* (although not explicitly stated) is for people to download
> the document and play around with it (the document in question is an OpenGL
> programming tutorial).
>
> Now suppose they decide to make money off the document, so they set up a
> commerce site and charge for access to that document.
>
> Am I allowed to give my copy of the document, from when it was freely
> available off the web, to somebody?
>
> Am I now obligated to delete the document off my hard drive?

All I can figure is that that would be up to the creator of the document.  You 
already own a copy of the document, having downloaded it for free, so it is 
now your document, to do with as you wish.  You're not allowed to make money 
off of it or claim that it is your own (such is the nature of copyrights), 
and you probably shouldn't be distributing it either.

Personally, I'd rather that such documents were spread with Creative 
Commons-style licenses, and that the people who release documents for free 
should realize that it's probably too late to make money off of them later 
on.

Of course, I'm not a lawyer, so take my answer with the biggest grain of salt 
you can find.  As a writer, though, this is an issue which is important to me 
personally.

-- 
Slainte,
Richard S. Crawford (mailto: rscrawford at mossroot.com)
AIM: Buffalo2K / http://www.mossroot.com
"You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus."
-Mark Twain
GPG Public Key located at: http://www.mossroot.com/rscrawford.asc
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