Copyright

[Andy Waddington]

On Tuesday 2006-05-16 12:42, GRAHAM MULLAN wrote:

> What Andy appears to be missing is that Ed had previously stated that he 
> would have refused permission for this work to be used by this person in 
> this way had he been asked.

That is why I suggested that the dispute arose because of wanting to
overprotect !! Precisely my point.

> I do not 
> know what Ed's reason for withholding his consent might have been, but then 
> neither does Andy.

I didn't suggest that I did. Merely that this sort of dispute only arises
because people are, for whatever reason, overprotective of IP. Now that Ed
has told us his reasons (which I won't quote at length here) I would still
suggest that a Creative Commons licence would have been appropriate, with
an Attribution-non-commercial-sharealike version seeming most appropriate.
With a CC licence, you have a large community behind you when you complain,
and this is a force that reputable publishers (and even printers, for books
privately published) won't want to come into conflict with.

It's clear that in the gift economy that characterises free software and
creative commons work, Luck Walschot has thrown away the most valuable
commodity of all - reputation. He is now morally impoverished and a
pariah in the circles that should matter. He has very little left to
live for and may as well give up and kill himself - what further external
action is required ?

Andy