Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2001 01:48:39 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: brett@lariat.org (Brett Glass) Cc: davids@webmaster.com (David Schwartz), mwm@mired.org (Mike Meyer), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Stallman stalls again Message-ID: <200103070148.SAA06002@usr05.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010306174928.00d45220@localhost> from "Brett Glass" at Mar 06, 2001 05:53:58 PM
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> I disagree. I think that there is a general consensus that authors do > have moral rights, and at least some of the current laws are honest > efforts to protect them. The DMCA is not one of those laws, though. Authors do not have moral rights; they have legal rights, granted to them under law, such law in the United States being an instrumentality of Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; That "Right" is a legal right, not a moral right. If "intellectual property" were real property, as AT&T tried to claim in their lawsuit against UCB, and as they pretended when they distributed their "cease and desist" letters, then, like any real property, I could establish a proscriptive lien through adverse use. In other words, I could claim "squatters rights", since AT&T did not prevent me from using their "trade secrets" for more than a year. I would _dearly_ love for some court to screw up somewhere, and declare intellectual property to be real property. One thing that would be immediately interesting, should that happen, is that all patent and copyright assignments would become invalid, without a bill of sale, transfer of title, or deed (even selling mineral rights requires these things). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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