Re: Patches...

In article <42m...@4ax.com>, patches wrote:
 [snip]
>that)  and what you put on a website for someone to look at, copy and
>use, is to my knowledge still game for the taking.... like it or not,
>if you don't want it stolen or used, don't put it on a website for
>people to do that to.  Most people who in IRC color the ASCII art,
>leave the initials intact, but all of a sudden they need permission to
>do so?  Since when?  If you put it on your site, its there for people
>to do what they wish with, hopefully they are respectable enough to
>give credit, and keep the initials intact.

Without commenting on the rest of your post, this is incorrect.  Making
content, such as ASCII art, available over the WWW does emphatically not
place it into the public domain.

I Am Not An Intellectual Property Lawyer.  However, if all of the WWW
was in public domain, all the copyright notices you see on websites
would be useless.  As many of these have been written and/or reviewed by
competent lawyers, I feel justified in stating my common sense belief --
that material on the WWW is not freely usable -- as fact.

Allowing unrestricted access to content over the WWW, and particularly
providing a link to said content, does effectively grant an implicit
permission for said content to be downloaded and viewed, and arguably
also for it to be stored and distributed by proxy servers.  Just like
posting a message to Usenet grants an implicit permission for the
message to be distributed and read, in fact.  It does not, however,
affect the fact that the material is still under copyright, and may not
be otherwise used without permission from the author.


>Brenda also has a cd image of my website, which I never sent or gave
>her, she must have downloaded it, or went thru and saved each page.
>Do I care?  No, I do not. Oh wait, maybe I should sue her for
>downloading my site... oh no, invasion of the html.... hahaa... NOT!!!

If you do not care, you should consider stating so on the website.  Then
mirroring it would be completely legal.

In general, it is true that copyright law is not enforced much,
especially not in minor cases like this.  It still does exist, and
should be respected.  And when actual, printed books enter the picture,
the probability of someone caring enough to sue someone else does go up,
as there is actual money involved and as publishers are notoriously
paranoid about copyright.



>The way I see all this hoopla, is that while you have a point on
>permissions and original art permission should be given, your
>forgetting that this book would increase the recognition that ASCII
>art deserves and the artists who today still create and continue to
>support it's use.

I agree with the latter sentiment.  In fact, I agree with it so much
that in my opinion it would morally justify a copyright violation, if
that was the only way to accomplish the goal.  In this case, however, no
such necessity exists, so there is no excuse, legal or moral, for not
respecting Veronica's wishes.


>Tell me, Veronica, just where did you get the idea of the playing
>card?  Certainly you didn't make it up on your own, maybe you saw it
>on a deck of playing cards and drew it in ASCII art.... So, does that

As far as any playing card can be original, Veronica's certainly is.  It
is based on the same basic design as any traditional King of Hearts, but
a) this design is ancient, and b) even if it were recent enough to fall
under copyright laws, these do not forbid drawing inspiration from a
work as long there is no identifiable duplication in the result.  By the
very virtue of being an ASCII drawing, Veronica's card isn't a duplicate
of any existing non-ASCII playing card.

Further, even if Veronica's picture was a derivative of an existing
work, created without permission, that would only make her also guilty
of copyright violation.  It would not reduce the guilt of anyone further
violating Veronica's copyright.  Two wrongs do not make a right.

-- 
Ilmari Karonen - http://www.sci.fi/~iltzu/
"Although, I'm quite willing to believe both sides rant and get hysterical.
 From my observations such would be human normal."
                           -- Michelle Bottorff in rec.arts.sf.composition

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