permaculture

[Thilo Pfennig <tp@alternativ.net>]

On Tue, 2002-03-26 at 19:16, Loren Davidson wrote:

> caught with his hand in the cookie jar.  The total volume of your
> denials strike me as "the (lady) protesteth too much."

Ah, what made me angry were things like that Steve said that he was
given no credit where in fact his name can be seen by anbody on the
first paragraph. This was no thread, I WAS angry and now I am just
dissapointed.

 
> > As I have changed your work it can not be copyrighted by you any
> > more. 
> 
> Are you a lawyer?  If not, particularly if you aren't a copyright
> lawyer, don't go around offering legal opinions - it wastes time, and

If you change a work, it is not the same any more. I can not say "This
work is by Steve Diver and ATTRA" while in fact it isn't. So I only
could leave links broken or wait, until Steve changes his document. On
the other hand we had a sort of agreement for the form of the sgml
document which also changed the form.

And if I change things, I have to take care of this, what means
relicensing. The only other possibilty was canceling the agreement.


> IANAL either, but what you are saying doesn't ring true to me.  If what
> you say is true, then I could rip off anything in the world by changing
> four or five words in it and copyrighting it as mine.  And somehow I

I mean something different: If you change some words on a Shakespear
text - could you then say, it is original Shakespear? No you could not.
One could argue, that as updating information is in the interest of the
original author, this would be a "good" copyright break in comparison to
a "bad" break. But this is ridiculous.

> I fail to see how your modifications invalidate Steve's copyright; I
> believe you can only own your modifications, not the original source. 

I never had the feeling of "owning" this piece of information. What
should I do with this? It makes no difference to me who owns the text
accept, that if I am not allowed to change things, I can not work on the
document to make it better.


Maybe I wrote something misunderstandable. The core point is not who
personally owns the copyright (for me). I just wanted to work with the
document. And as I recall it I told Steve, what I wanted to do. If I am
wrong here with my memory, I surely have made a mistake. I do not have
any copies of mails to Steve, unfortunately. But maybe he finds
something, if he scans his old mails.

I have made so many web pages on my own for free since 1995 and I only
like to provide information for others not because I want to make money
with that. Believe it or not.


 
-- 
Thilo Pfennig
http://www.alternativ.net/edv/