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Re: [ox-en] Re: Graham Seaman * The Two Economies; Or: Why the washing machine question is the wrong question (was: [ox-en] Conference documentation)



On Sun, 6 Apr 2003, MJ Ray wrote:

Graham Seaman <graham opencollector.org> wrote:
This argument came up before the conference. I think copyleft for opinion
pieces is unneccessary and unhelpful (as does rms - eg

This is one of the places where I find rms's views on the subject of
copyright wholly arbitrary and illogical.  There are other laws which
protect the author against misrepresentation, so why use a heavy-handed
copyright sledgehammer that also smashes much of the usefulness of the
work?  I think rms's own arguments for the benefits of copyleft still
apply to opinion pieces, largely.

I can think of a couple of places where your article could provoke some
interesting debate, but as it stands, it is probably too long for those
meetings and purposes.   I doubt that I have time to paraphrase much of
it and still get the details correct.  Abridged versions for specific
situations would be useful, but is not possible at present.


Yes it is. You're allowed to summarize, quote from, or excerpt from 
someone else's work, copyrighted or not. That's fair use. 
I couldn't take that right away from you if I wanted to (which I most
certainly don't). 
There are disputes over the amount you can excerpt from a work just as 
fair use, but those are disputes over the law itself, not over
licenses. If someone isn't sure whether they're contravening fair use in
a particular case, the normal practice is to show the author what you've 
done and ask if it's ok. I would far rather rely on normal, social,
politeness, as has normally been done in the past, than encourage the
trend for people to think they can control every little detail of people's
behaviour through legal documents. If we need to bring in the law to 
decide how we behave to one another all the time we're in a bad way...


Graham


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