Uploading PDFs of railroad modeling magazines (scans) - inappropriate?

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In the case of the sold painting, the painting, once sold, becomes a work for hire, and the copyright passes to the buyer. This is true of magazine articles and illustrations as well.

Copywrite and patent laws differ from country to country.

I wasn't trying to formulate law, I was merely setting out the conditions I need to continue as an artist and sometimes inventor.

Copywrite and patents (need to) exist to make it worthwhile for writers, artists and inventors to create. Without some protection in law I might as well work as a filing clerk or shop assistant selling knock off copies of Edison phonographs and Ford Model Ts.

Think again about that statement.

If you contracted for a painting, then it is a work for hire and you do own all rights to it.

If you buy an existing painting from the artist, you bought just the painting for display, you have not acquired the rights to sell duplicate prints unless these rights were explicitly passed to you when you purchased the painting.

Howard Garner

For a long time I've wondered about the disparity in length between rights given to inventors (patents) and authors/artists/composers (copyright). Why should an author get a lifetime plus whatever years protection for their creation while an inventor gets a mere 20 years of exclusive control of their creation. Something is unbalanced there. As for your comment about reproducing something which is no longer on the market, I've seen people try to use that to justify copying old software games, like Wizardry or Ultima. Thankfully, some of the game companies have allowed this at sites like The Underdogs.

On the other hand, are you suggesting that it should be in perpetuity? There's a lot of problems with that, including when your 100+ great-grandchildren get to arguing as to who gets how much. And why

*should* they get money for something they've done nothing to earn?

Then there's the misuse - I just heard a bit about two of Jimi Hendrix's relatives fighting over whether it was right for one to license some obnoxious car company to use Hendrix singing as a background for a car ad. Or the family of Che Guevera being *EXTREMELY* unhappy at the commercial use of his image, esp. when they get nothing, and it's being used for no purpose other than to make money for someone else.

It also destroys the whole concept of public domain.

It *also* probably results in large estates, managed by lawyers who pay themselves a *lot* of money for "managing' the estate. Consider the RIAA... esp. since most non-big-stars get literally little-to-nothing of those royalties.

And it *loses* value if it's been "vandalized".

Uh, no. Not whatsoever. Either the magazine bought *all* rights, and so they own it, and it *has* become work for hire, or, like some *honest* mags, reassign the rights to the author (or only buy first pub rights up front). It doesn't just "fall" into the public domain.

Damn, I *know* someone said something about the difference between patent and copyright, and the length they run. Anyway, the reason for that is in the intent of patent: it's *intended* to promote invention (we'll ignore the damn patent trolls, and the obscenity of software patents). In many cases, within 20 years, the technique has been superceded by newer, sometimes better techniques. One story, on the other hand, is *not* necessarily "better".

mark

It's losing value by being vandalized doesn't affect the value of my other works.

I've published on the Internet. I've seen my writing reappear numerous times, sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not.

We're still using paper and light bulbs. (I'm sure everyone can come up with another item or two) Take Kadee couplings as an example - Kadee had 25 years of protection to establish their coupler as the US model coupler of choice.

400 million yanks had 25 years to design something to supercede it and didn't. The moment their patent expired there were numerous compatible couplers on the market.

Greg.P.

Rick Jones wrote in news:LXafk.15500$ snipped-for-privacy@flpi144.ffdc.sbc.com:

With inventions, if I copy your design and make my own, yours has lost little or no value. Afterall, a hammer's value isn't the fact it's got a nice hickory handle and precision machined steel head, it's that it hits nails. Copyrighted works, OTOH, lose most of their value when their uniqueness is gone. Imagine if everyone had "original" Picassos. They'd be pretty much worthless.

Software's a whole 'nother story. I think software should be given its own protections under a new category of copyright law, with a firm concept of abandonware defined; at least for operating systems and firmware required to make hardware work.

Puckdropper

mark wrote: [...]

IOW, you're arguing that inheritance of property is immoral. H'mmm.

Red herring, anyhow. Ownership depends on how the testator's will assigns it.

Just that there should be limits. Unless you really want your daughter or granddaughter to be the next Paris Hilton?

mark *all* of my kids are earning their own way, and I'm proud of them"

This is not true. One type of fallacious argument is the Problematic Premise. A premise is presented as a factual starting point and may either be simply accepted or may require evidence to back it up.

If the premise is not accepted and cannot be backed up by evidence, it is problematic and the rest of the argument falls apart. Thus, the premise is invalid.

This is related to the issue of copyright as it applies to a letter, and by extension, email.

Way back when I took a typing class in high school (now called 'keyboarding'!), we learned about formatting a letter. When one wishes to send the letter to other parties, there is a legal requirement to say so in "CC" lines at the bottom. The reason for this, we were told, was that once a letter is sent to someone, it becomes their property and you cannot send copies to anyone else without their permission. The 'CC' information is a statement before ownership transfers. I have on the odd occasion sent a letter that I was not immediately sending a copy anywhere, so placed a statement at the bottom that I reserved the right to forward the letter to third parties at a later date.

With the arrival of email, it was always my assumption that the same issues with paper letters also applied to email. However, the electronic age has evolved the concept of copyright into 'intellectual property' and there are a significant number of people who believe that email falls into the same category as any other work that one might create and place on the internet - that the writer owns the copyright even after it is sent.

But what happens when your creation is a product? Aren't you then suggesting that at some point, Coca-Cola should no longer have exclusive rights to their own formula? Or that some other soft drink company should be able to freely duplicate it and sell it at a lesser price?

I'm not an attorney, but there have been times that I've been accused of thinking like one. I guess that, because we can come up with all of these weird situations that don't seem to fit, the law does need to be complicatd. Look at all of the posts in this thread and you will see a variety of situations where a simple solution just won't work.

What really gets convoluted is if you compare intellectual property rights to real property rights. I build a house, I own it. I write a poem, I own it. But we are saying here that, while we have no real problems with my home ownership, we do have problems with my owing the poem. The difference in the way we react to this is based on the difference in the way we see the two different pieces of property. But they are both ours...

Are we having fun yet?

dlm

Uh, that's not a "copyright" at all: it's either a patent or a trade secret, and the same rules do not apply.

-Pete

"Problematic Premise" is a term new to me, but I think I see your point. All logic texts I know (and courses I took) use "sound/unsound" and "valid/invalid" to characterise arguments, and "true/false" to characterise statements, including premises.

What you describe is usually called an unsound argument - one whose premise is false, but is nevertheless valid. NB that a sound argument is a valid argument with a true premise.

A premise, like any other statement, may be true or false.

An argument (== a series of statements beginning with a premise, and ending in a conclusion) is valid if and only if no consistent combination of truth-values of its constituent statements leads from a true premise to a false conclusion. To test the validity of an argument, just assign all possible truth-value combinations, and see what happens. This is a completely mechanical procedure. With a complex argument, it can get very tedious, but it's possible to use shortcuts that show the argument is "always true", ie, that it's not possible to assign truth-values such that the premise is true and the conclusion is false.

The problem is of course that the truth of a premise is not and cannot be demonstrated by the validity of the argument. If that were possible, then contradictory statements would all be true.

Google on "symbolic logic" for more clarification of my comments.

BTW, there are several systems of "3-valued logic". In one, a statement may be true, false, or indeterminate. In another, true, false, or neither. There is also "fuzzy logic", which assigns a degree of truth to a statement (1=true, 0=false, 0.8=mostly true, etc.) You can have a lot of fun working out conditions of soundness and validity for these logics. If your taste runs that way. ;-)

Binary logic is the basis of all computers as we know and love or hate them. Fuzzy logic is used in "smart" washing machines, digital cameras, etc.

Of course some other company can reproduce Coca Cola's formula. If it was reproduced exactly the same then Coca Cola could take the other company to court, nation by nation. However, the copying company needs only alter one component/ingredient by a tiny amount and it would no longer be "copying". For that reason, Coca Cola maintains extreme secrecy on it's formula.

I'm having a house built to my own floor plan - the building company wants to add my floor plan to their book of standard designs. I feel slightly complimented. :-)

If you write a poem, you still hold the original, just as I will hold the original house. Copies of the poem or the house are just copies. It's the intellectual input that (should) belong to the originator. Your poem consists of words and concepts already invented and in common use, as does my house. It's the way those commonly used compents are put together that makes them unique.

Of course, Greg.P.

Hi Wolf,

I would not be happy with your 'true/false' division of premise, statement, argument, logic because each of those can be different in different situations. Even asigning a numerical value to different factors of an argument can lead you astray.

Regards, Greg.P.

On 7/17/2008 5:55 AM Calvin Henry-Cotnam spake thus:

I don't know for sure, but suspect that this is more of a formality than any kind of legally enforceable requirement. I don't think the omission of a "CC" at the bottom of a letter would have held up in court even then.

I remember taking business law in college (actually one of the better courses in my business admin. program), and learning that, contrary to widely-held belief, contracts need not follow any standard form to be enforceable--including being written at all. In other words, an oral contract is just as legally binding as a written one.) Of course, only a fool would recommend that someone *not* get it in writing, and, as the professor pointed out, trying to make good on a disputed oral contract would degenerate into a "he said--she said" situation.

Now if only I could remember the key requirements of a valid contract: lessee:

1. Consideration (quid pro quo, or "something for something" of real value, which is why governments and other bodies sometimes lease or sell valuable properties for a dollar).
2. A meeting of the minds.

1. Capacity to perform (which is why you *can't* offer a valid contract for the Brooklyn Bridge, sorry).

Or something like that ...

The trouble is that anything published in any of the regular mags, esp. Kalmbach, is really bought-and-paid-for, and so *is* work for hire, and they do own all rights. If they found out you'd scanned it and sold it, for example, they would come down on you like a ton of bricks. Giving it away is a little more problematical, but not much - they can still get a judgement against you, and you probably can't afford it.

mark

Frankly, even if there was some questionable legality involved, most companies have deeper pockets than individuals - they can basically litigate you to death, even if you're right...

-Brent