User:Mdupont/WhatEveryoneShouldKnowAboutCopyright

What everyone should know about copyright and copyleft

This is the wikipage for my conference talk at SFK http://kosovasoftwarefreedom.org/

copyright (c) 2009 James Michael DuPont, licensed under creative commons share alike. Contains many sections from wikipedia.

Short Bio:

James Michael DuPont has been an independent computer consultant since 2004. He has been looking into free software since 1994.

mail : h4ck3rm1k3@flossk.org

Social Aspects of copying
According to Maslow, our main motivation is to reach our greatest potential.

The motivation to realize one's own maximum potential and possibilities is considered to be the master motive or the only real motive, all other motives being its various forms.

Social recognition
People have a basic need to be loved, appreciated and approved.

Humans need to feel a sense of belonging and acceptance, whether it comes from a large social group or small social connections.

Reward System
The reward system of money represents the most basic form of reward. Money fulfills or helps fulfill the more basic needs. Money gives prices that represents the market value for goods and helps guide decisions.

Yet money cannot *make* us reach our maximum potential or give us all things that we need : Money cannot buy you love or recognition of your peers. It cannot make you younger.

Attribution / recognizing the source
It is important to attribute (to pay tribute), give credit to the author of an idea.

This is a basic social behavior. Like paying money, paying in attribution is a basic social behaviour. It is also the foundation of creative commons, the attribution level is the most basic allowance of copying (you can copy my work if you give me credit, but not money, and do not change it).

Memes
The idea of a Meme is a theory from Richard_Dawkins, that ideas live independently of people, and that they are copied from person to person.

So with the Meme theory is that we are rewarded when the meme is copied.

A meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/, rhyming with "cream") is a postulated unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or   practices, and is transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. (The etymology of the term relates to the Greek word mimema for "something imitated".) Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures.[3] Memeticists have not empirically proven the existence of  discrete memes or their proposed mechanism, and memes (as distinct from ideas or cultural phenomena) do not form part of the consensus of mainstream social sciences. The word was first introduced by British scientist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976) to discuss evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. He gave as examples melodies, catch-phrases, and beliefs (notably religious beliefs), clothing/fashion, and the technology of building arches.

Money is the reward that people get for successful selling of books for example and that encourages and enables them to create more.

Ideally money would be a form of control to guide successful ideas and to provide feedback about that represents the viability of the idea, or the number of copies of it.

The viability for software is how many times the code is used, copied, and modified.

In fact the usage of the software, its utility is the ultimate measurement of its survival.

Software is copied if people see a need for it, generally when it is recommended.

Software is generally only changed when there is a need, when there are problems.

We are rewarded by our peers and feel good when our ideas are considered valuable, they survive and are copied.

History of copying
Why is it so cheap to copy? Because we have cheap computers, ram, disk and internet connections.

The technology of Communication has improved over time.

Basically it is the sensing of pressure waves and vibrations. There are it has been shown that plants can hear. And there are plants that eat insects that react to touch, to changes in pressure. So the basic forms of life are reacting to changes in the environment.
 * With the advent of Music we can express feelings to each other, even animals have songs and they can be seen as communicating and copying each other. The receptors and producers of sound have improved over the history of life on this planet.

The cost of copying was always there. For example animals are able to mimic the sounds of others. But this can take a very long time. Sometimes species can mimic other species, and this can cost many lives.


 * With Invention of Language we could talk to each other and not just mimic each other.

The language reduced the symbols in size and standardized them.


 * With the invention of Oral_history we have a collective memory.

The cost of copying was very high. The books had to be copied manually. This was an very high price. We did not really need copyright at this time, because the material was copy protected, by the cost of copying.
 * With Invention of Writing we can write down our ideas and transfer them across time and space.

one book many times and the price was reduced extremely. This price would drop over time. With movable type we had reusable letters and words.
 * With the invention of Printing we had even cheaper ways to copy information. We could copy


 * The usage of computers for communication. Timeline_of_computing_2400_BC%E2%80%931949


 * The cost of Computers has gone down enormously.
 * The cost of Random_access_memory has gone down enormously.
 * The cost of Internet access has gone down enormously.

see also the History_of_computing_hardware

cost of Storage
Vacuum tube computers List_of_vacuum_tube_computers were very expensive.

The cost of random access memory has been steadly decreasing.

in 1957.00 one transistor flipflop cost 392.00$

cost of disk
Cost of disk memory is dropping fast.

In 1956	IBM sold 5 megabytes 	for	U$10,000 per megabyte. in 2004 the Western Digital Caviar SE with 250 gigabytes 	was 8.70 megabytes for 1 dollar.

Intellectual property
Some of these alternative names would be an improvement, but it is a mistake to replace “intellectual property” with any other term. A different name will not address the term's deeper problem: overgeneralization. There is no such unified thing as “intellectual property”—it is a mirage. The only reason people think it makes sense as a coherent category is that widespread use of the term gives that impression. The term “intellectual property” is at best a catch-all to lump together disparate laws. Non-lawyers who hear one term applied to these various laws tend to assume they are based on a common principle, and function similarly.

Intellectual property (IP) is a number of distinct types of legal monopolies over creations of the mind, both artistic and commercial, and the corresponding fields of law. Under intellectual property law, owners are granted certain exclusive rights to  a variety of intangible assets, such as musical, literary, and artistic works; ideas, discoveries and inventions; and words, phrases, symbols, and designs. Common types of intellectual property include copyrights, trademarks, patents, industrial design rights and trade secrets in some jurisdictions.

public domain
The public domain is the intellectual property of the public.

The public domain is a range of abstract materials—commonly referred to as intellectual property— which are not owned or controlled by anyone. The term indicates that these materials are therefore "public property", and available for anyone to use for any purpose. The public domain can be defined in contrast to several forms of intellectual property; the public domain in contrast to copyrighted works is different from the public domain in contrast to trademarks or patented works. Furthermore, the laws of various countries define the scope of   the public domain differently, making it necessary to specify which jurisdiction's public domain is being discussed.

The public domain is most often discussed in contrast to works whose use is restricted by copyright. Under modern law, most original works of art, literature, music, etc. are covered by copyright from the time of their creation for a limited period of time (which varies by country). When the copyright expires, the work enters the public domain. It is estimated that currently, of all the books found in the world's libraries, only about 15% are in the public domain, even though only 10% of all books are still in print; the remaining 75% are books which remain unavailable because they are still under copyright protection.

The public domain can also be defined in contrast to trademarks. Names, logos, and other identifying marks used in commerce can be restricted as proprietary trademarks for a single business to use. Trademarks can be maintained indefinitely, but they can also lapse through disuse, negligence, or  widespread misuse, and enter the public domain. It is possible, however, for a lapsed trademark to become proprietary again, leaving the public domain.

The public domain also contrasts with patents. New inventions can be registered and granted patents restricting others from using the inventions without permission from the inventor. Like copyrights, patents last for a limited period of time, after which the inventions covered by them enter the public domain and can be used by anyone.

us federal government content is public domain
The content created by the US federal government belongs to the public domain.

A work of the United States government, as defined by United States copyright law, is   "a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. government as part of that person's official duties." The term only applies to the work of the federal government, not state or local governments. In general, under section 105 of the Copyright Act,[2] such works are not entitled to domestic copyright protection under U.S. law, sometimes referred to as "noncopyright." Note that the act only speaks about domestic copyright. The USA can still hold the copyright of those works in other countries

even in kosovo
The government of Kosovo's Webpage is also under the public domain.

The material on the Prime Minister of Kosovo’s website is in the public domain and may be reproduced and distributed without prior permission. Hypertext links to this site may also be made without any prior permission. Citation of the material received and/or used from this website is welcome. Any material on this site which is subject to the copyright of a third party requires that any reproduction of this material receive the permission of  the appropriate copyright holder.

speed of change of technology
The investment in the technology to produce copies is being rapidly outdated. Printing presses, Vinyl LP Presses, Video Cassette recorders. Copying machines.

Music Devices

 * Programmable Musical Machine

The Banu Musa also invented "the earliest known mechanical musical instrument", in this case a hydropowered organ which played interchangeable cylinders automatically. According to Charles B. Fowler, this "cylinder with raised pins on the surface remained the basic device to produce and  reproduce music mechanically until the second half of the nineteenth century." The Banu Musa also invented an automatic flute player which appears to have been the first programmable machine.

In the 14th century, Flanders introduced a mechanical bell-ringer controlled by a rotating cylinder. Similar designs appeared in barrel organs (15th century), musical clocks (1598), barrel pianos (1805), and musical boxes (1815). All of these machines could play stored music, but they could not play arbitrary sounds, could not record a live performance, and were limited by the physical size of the medium.
 * Bell ringers and musical boxes

The first device that could record sound mechanically (but could not play it back) was the phonautograph, developed in 1857 by Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. The earliest known recordings of the human voice were phonautograms also made in 1857. These earliest known recordings include a dramatic reading in French of Shakespeare's Othello and music played on a guitar and trumpet. The recordings consist of groups of wavy lines scratched by a stylus onto fragile paper that was blackened by the soot from an oil lamp. One of his phonautograms of Au Clair de la Lune, a French folk song, was digitally converted to sound in 2008. While this is an interesting playback that sounds like a girl singing, the creator of this recording, Patrick Feaster of Indiana University in Bloomington, reports that phonautograms his team had previously transcribed, using a laser as a virtual stylus, had been played back at twice the actual speed. What sounded like a girl singing the French folksong was actually Léon Scott singing, Feaster concluded in May, 2009. Since the above recording was recovered, the same team have since recovered a recording of a 435-Hz tuning fork (at that time the French standard concert pitch for A' — now 440 Hz). The tuning fork is barely audible.
 * First recording devices (phonautograms)

The player piano, first demonstrated in 1876, used a punched paper scroll that could store an arbitrarily long piece of music. This piano roll moved over a device known as the 'tracker bar', which first had 58 holes, was expanded to 65 and then was upgraded to 88 holes (generally, one for each piano key). When a perforation passed over the hole, the note sounded. Piano rolls were the first stored music medium that could be mass-produced, although the hardware to play them was much too expensive for personal use. Technology to record a live performance onto a piano roll was not developed until 1904. Piano rolls have been in continuous mass production since around 1898. A 1908 U.S. Supreme Court copyright case noted that, in 1902 alone, there were between 70,000 and 75,000 player pianos manufactured, and between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 piano rolls produced. The use of piano rolls began to decline in the 1920s although one type is still being made today. The fairground organ, developed in 1892, used a similar system of accordion-folded punched cardboard books
 * Player Piano and fairground organ

Printing Devices

 * Printing Press

The mechanical systems of the Printing Press were first assembled in Germany by the goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg around 1440, based on existing screw-presses used to   press cloth, grapes, etc. and possibly prints. Gutenberg was the first in Western Europe to develop a printing press.

Offset printing is a commonly used printing technique where the inked image is transferred (or "offset") from a plate to a rubber blanket, then to the printing surface. When used in combination with the lithographic process, which is based on the repulsion of oil and water, the offset technique employs a flat (planographic) image carrier on which the image to be printed obtains ink from ink rollers, while the non-printing area attracts a water-based film (called "fountain solution"), keeping the non-printing areas ink-free. Ira Washington Rubel invented the first offset printing press in 1903.
 * Offset Printing

The laser printer was invented at Xerox in 1969 by researcher Gary Starkweather, who had an improved printer working by 1971 and incorporated into a fully functional networked printer system by about a year later. The prototype was built by modifying an  existing xerographic copier. Starkweather disabled the imaging system and created a spinning drum with 8 mirrored sides, with a laser focused on the drum. Light from the laser would bounce off the spinning drum, sweeping across the page as it traveled through the copier. The hardware was completed in just a week or two, but the computer interface and software took almost 3 months to complete. The first commercial implementation of a laser printer was the IBM model 3800 in 1976, used for high-volume printing of documents such as invoices and mailing labels. It is often cited as "taking up a whole room," implying that it was a primitive version of the later familiar device used with a personal computer. While large, it was designed for an entirely different purpose.
 * Laser_printer

Desktop publishing began in 1985 with the introduction of MacPublisher, the first WYSIWYG layout program, which ran on the original 128K Macintosh computer. (Desktop typesetting,  with only limited page makeup facilities, had arrived in 1978–9 with the introduction of TeX,  and was extended in the early 1980s by LaTeX.) The DTP market exploded in 1985 with the introduction in January of the Apple LaserWriter printer, and later in July with the introduction of PageMaker software from Aldus which rapidly became the DTP industry standard software. The ability to create WYSIWYG page layouts on screen and then print pages at crisp 300 dpi resolution was revolutionary for both the typesetting industry and the personal computer industry. Newspapers and other print publications made the move to DTP-based programs from older layout systems like Atex and other such programs in the early 1980s.
 * Desktop Publishing

Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that gives a cyan-blue print. The English scientist and astronomer Sir John Herschel discovered this procedure in 1842. Even though John Herschel is perhaps the inventor of the cyanotype process, Anna Atkins actually brought this to photography. She created a limited series of cyanotype books that documented ferns and other plant life. By using this process, Anna Atkins is regarded as the first female photographer.
 * Cyanotype

The stencil duplicator or mimeograph machine (often abbreviated to mimeo) is a low-cost printing press that works by forcing ink through a stencil onto paper. Along with spirit duplicators and hectographs, mimeographs were for many decades used to print short-run office work, classroom materials, and church bulletins. They also were critical to the development of early fanzines because their low cost and availability enabled publication of amateur writings. These technologies began to be supplanted by photocopying and cheap offset printing in the late 1960s.
 * Mimeograph_machine

Xerographic office photocopying was introduced by Xerox in the 1960s, and over the following 20 years it gradually replaced copies made by  Verifax, Photostat_machine, Carbon_paper, mimeograph machines, and other duplicating machines. The prevalence of its use is one of the factors that prevented the development of the paperless office heralded early in the digital revolution.
 * Copy machines

MUSIC
A gramophone record (also known as phonograph record, vinyl record, or simply record) is an analog sound storage medium consisting of a flat disc with an inscribed modulated spiral groove usually starting near the periphery and ending near the centre of the disc. When made of polyvinyl chloride, such a disc is also known as a vinyl record. Gramophone records were the primary medium used for commercial music reproduction for most of the 20th century. They replaced the phonograph cylinder as the most popular recording medium in the 1900s. For the most part, they were supplanted in popularity in the late 1980s by digital media, leaving mainstream in 1991.
 * Gramaphone :

The reel-to-reel format was used in the very earliest tape recorders, including the pioneering German Magnetophons of the 1930s. Originally, this format had no name, since all forms of magnetic tape recorders used it. The name arose only with the need to distinguish it from the several kinds of tape cartridges or cassettes which were introduced in the early 1960s. Thus, the term "reel-to-reel" is an example of a retronym. Reel-to-reel tape was also used in early tape drives for data storage on mainframe computers, video tape machines, and later for high quality analog and digital audio recorders in the 1980s and 1990s, before hard disk recording effectively eliminated the need for reel-to-reel technology.
 * Reel to reel :

Stereo 8, commonly known as the eight-track cartridge, eight-track tape, or eight-track, is a magnetic tape sound recording technology, popular from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. Stereo 8 was created in 1964 by a consortium led by Bill Lear of Lear Jet Corporation, along with Ampex, Ford Motor Company, Motorola and RCA Victor Records (RCA). It was a further development of the similar Stereo-Pak four-track cartridge created by Earl "Madman" Muntz. A later quadraphonic version of the format was known as Quad 8 or Q8.
 * 8-track_tape

The Compact Cassette, often referred to as audio cassette, cassette tape, cassette, or simply tape, is a magnetic tape sound recording format. Although originally designed for dictation, improvements in fidelity led the Compact Cassette to supplant reel-to-reel tape recording in most non-professional applications. Its uses ranged from portable audio to home recording to data storage for early microcomputers. Between the early 1970s and late 1990s, the cassette was one of the two most common formats for prerecorded music, first alongside the LP and later the Compact Disc. Cassette is a French word meaning "little box."
 * Compact Cassette

Betamax (sometimes termed Beta) is a home videocassette tape recording format developed by Sony, released on May 10, 1975. The cassettes contain 1/2-inch (12.7mm)-wide videotape in a design similar to the earlier, professional 3/4-inch (19.05mm) U-matic videocassette format. The format is generally considered obsolete, though it is still used in specialist applications by a small minority of people. Like the rival videotape format VHS (introduced in September 1976 by JVC), Betamax had no guard band and used azimuth recording to reduce crosstalk. According to Sony's own history webpages, the name came from a double meaning: beta being the Japanese word used to describe the way signals were recorded onto the tape, and from the fact that when the tape ran through the transport, it looked like the Greek letter beta (β). The suffix -max came from "maximum", to suggest greatness.
 * Betamax

Video Home System, better known by its abbreviation VHS, is a video tape recording standard developed during the 1970s. It was released to the public during the latter half of the decade. During the late part of the 1970s and the early 1980s it formed one-half of the VHS vs Betamax war, which it would eventually go on to win. VHS' properties include longer playing time, faster rewinding and fast-forwarding, and a less complex tape transport mechanism. The open standard used for VHS technology allowed mass production without licensing costs. VHS would eventually come out as the winning video tape format, surpassing other home tape formats by the 1990s. In later years, optical disc formats began to offer better quality than video tape, and took over in film studios, then retailers, and finally video rental stores. By 2006, the United States had stopped releasing new movie titles in VHS format, opting for others such as DVD and Blu-ray. On December 23, 2008, the last major United States supplier of pre-recorded VHS tapes, Distribution Video Audio Inc. of Palm Harbor, Florida, shipped its final truckload.
 * VHS

A MiniDisc (MD) is a magneto-optical disc-based data storage device initially intended for storage of up to 80 minutes of digitized audio. Today, in the form of Hi-MD, it has developed into a general-purpose storage medium in addition to greatly expanding its audio roots. MiniDisc was announced by Sony in 1991 and introduced January 12, 1992. The music format was originally based exclusively on ATRAC audio data compression, but the option of linear PCM recording was ultimately introduced to attain CD-quality recordings. MiniDiscs were popular in Japan and Asia as a digital upgrade from cassette tapes, but were not as popular elsewhere.
 * MiniDisc

Looms
Now can see the Loom had created a programmable device.

The Jacquard loom is a mechanical loom, invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801, that simplifies the process of manufacturing textiles with complex patterns such as brocade, damask, and matelasse. The loom is controlled by punchcards with punched holes, each row of which corresponds to one row of   the design. Multiple rows of holes are punched on each card and the many cards that compose the design of the textile are strung together in order. It is based on earlier inventions by the Frenchmen Basile Bouchon (1725), Jean Falcon (1728) and Jacques Vaucanson (1740).
 * Jacquard loom

copyright acts
The Copyright Act of 1790 was the first federal copyright act to be instituted in the United States, though most of the states had passed various legislation securing copyrights in the years immediately following the Revolutionary War. The stated object of the act was the "encouragement of learning," and it achieved this by securing authors the "sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending" the copies of their "maps, charts, and books" for a term of 14 years, with the right to renew for one additional 14 year term should the copyright holder still be  alive.

The US Copyright ACT of 1909 allowed for works to be copyrighted for a period of 28 years from the date of publication, renewable once for a second 28-year term

The US Copyright ACT of 1976 Act spells out the basic rights of copyright holders, codified the doctrine of "fair use," and for most new copyrights adopted a unitary term based on the date of the author's death rather than the prior scheme of fixed initial and renewal terms.

software contracting
The first computer programs were written by employees for companies. The license was work done for the employer.

A number of people who had learned their programming skills working for computer manufacturers or for the large companies and government agencies that were the first computer users saw this as an opportunity to start their own companies and sell their services under contract.

first software products
But early in the 1960s, some contract programming firms began to see opportunities, when there was no comparable product available from the hardware vendor, to sell programs they had written to more than one customer.

For example, CACI began selling SIMSCRIPT, a simulation language, in 1962, and ADPAC Corporation made several sales of its ADPAC compiler in 1964 to customers who had seen it used by   ADPAC programmers and wanted it available to their own programmers.

In 1965, ADR released AUTOFLOW, a program which automatically produced program flowcharts by   reading the program source code, and which ultimately was sold to thousands of customers. And in November, 1967, Informatics released MARK IV, a generalized file management and report generation program, which surpassed $1 million in revenues within 12 months after its formal announcement.

software licenses
According to the Copyright Office, the first deposit of a computer program for registration was on November 30, 1961

Under the Copyright Act of 1909, copyright protection required registration of the copyright at the time of first publication.

According to the Copyright Office, the first deposit of a computer program for registration was on November 30, 1961.

A software license agreement is a contract between a producer and a purchaser of computer software that is   included with software. The license may define ways under which the copy can be used, in addition to the automatic rights of the buyer including the first sale doctrine and 17 U.S.C. § 117 (freedom to use, archive,  re-sale, and backup). These documents often call themselves end-user license agreements (EULAs).

A software license (or software licence in commonwealth usage) is a legal instrument governing the usage or   redistribution of copyright protected software. All software not in the Public domain is copyright protected. A typical software license grants an end-user permission to use one or more copies of software in ways where such a use would otherwise constitute infringement of the software publisher's exclusive rights under copyright law.

Proprietary software is any computer software with restrictions on use or private modification, or with restrictions judged to be excessive on copying or publishing of modified or unmodified versions. The term proprietary software is thus the opposite of free software, generally speaking. These restrictions are placed on it by one of its proprietors. Similar terms include "closed-source software" and "non-free software".

These licenses, first used in the late 1960's, allow access to the source code under very restrictive conditions

Free software or software libre is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or   with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things and that manufacturers of consumer-facing hardware allow user modifications to their hardware. Free software is available gratis (free of charge) in most cases.

Free and open source software, also F/OSS, FOSS, or FLOSS (free/libre/open source software) is   software which is liberally licensed to grant the right of users to study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code. This approach has gained both momentum and acceptance as the potential benefits have been increasingly recognized by both individuals and corporate players

Software copyright, the relatively recent extension of copyright law to machine-readable software. It is used by proprietary software companies to prevent the unauthorized copying of their software. It is also used by proponents of open source software to encourage the disclosure of improvements to source code.

Copyleft is a play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to  remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of a work for others and requiring that the same freedoms be preserved in modified versions.

enforcement of copyright
Here I will cover the basic procedure for handling problems.
 * 1) Send a cease-and-desist letter.  The copyright owner is responsible for notifying the infringer about the problem and asking them to stop.
 * 2) Optionally seek a temporary restraining order. The court might ask the infringer to stop immediately.
 * 3) File lawsuit. The copyright owner files a lawsuit in court.
 * 4) Seek a preliminary injunction. Again, the court might ask the infringer to stop immediately, for the period of the trial.
 * 5) Proceed through trial to arrive at a final decree on permanent injunction and damages. And then the court might order for the equipment used for this infringement to be confiscated, copies to be destroyed.

copyright law history
The Statute of Anne (short title Copyright Act 1709 8 Anne c.19; long title   "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in    the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned") was the first copyright law in the Kingdom of Great Britain (thus the United Kingdom), enacted in 1709 and entering into force on 10 April 1710. It is generally considered to be the first fully-fledged copyright law. It is named for Queen Anne, during whose reign it was enacted.
 * Statute of Anne 1709 (Great Britain)

Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, signed in Paris, France, on March 20, 1883,
 * Paris Convention of 1883


 * Berne Convention of 1886

The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, usually known as the Berne Convention, is an international agreement governing copyright, which was first accepted in Berne, Switzerland in 1886.

Madrid Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Marks of April 14, 1891 The Madrid system for the international registration of marks, also conveniently known as the Madrid System, is the primary international system for facilitating the registration of trademarks in multiple jurisdictions around the world
 * Madrid Agreement/Madrid Protocol 1891

Before the advent of digital computers controlled by computer programs, there was another device whose particular function was controlled by an encoded sequence of instructions – the player piano. In 1908, the Supreme Court looked at the copyrightability of piano rolls in the case of   White-Smith Music v. Apollo. {FN1: 209 U.S. 1 (1908)}
 * Copyright act of 1908

The Hague Agreement concerning the International Deposit of Industrial Designs, also known as the Hague system provides a mechanism for registering an industrial design in several countries by means of a single application, filed in one language, with one set of fees. The system is adminstered by WIPO.
 * Hague Agreement (Industrial Designs) 1934

Lisbon Agreement on the Protection of Appellations of Origin and their Registration (1958)
 * Lisbon Agreement 1958

Rome Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organisations International Convention for the Protection of  Performers, Producers of Phonograms and   Broadcasting Organizations (Rome Convention,11 1961)
 * Rome Convention October 26, 1961.

Classification for Industrial Designs 8. Oktober 1968
 * Locarno Agreement -Locarno Agreement Establishing an International

The Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) is an international patent law treaty, concluded in 1970. It provides a unified procedure for filing patent applications to protect inventions in each of its Contracting States (see Accession section below for current membership information). A patent application filed under the PCT is called an international application or PCT application.
 * PCT Patent Cooperation Treaty 1970


 * Convention for the Protection of Producers of Phonograms Against Unauthorized Duplication of  their Phonograms (Phonogram Convention,Geneva 1971)


 * Universal Copyright Convention (Paris Text 1971)


 * Convention Relating to the Distribution of Programme-Carrying Signals Transmitted by Satellite (Satellite Convention, Brussels, 1974)

The Budapest Treaty on the International Recognition of the Deposit of Microorganisms for the Purposes of Patent Procedure, or Budapest Treaty, is an international treaty signed in Budapest, Hungary, on April 28, 1977. It entered into force on August 9, 1980, and was later amended on September 26, 1980. The treaty is administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
 * Budapest Treaty April 28, 1977


 * WIPO 1979 Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO Convention, 1967,as amended 1979)

The TRIPS Agreement is Annex 1C of the Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization, signed in Marrakesh, Morocco on 15 April 1994.
 * Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (WTO TRIPS Agreement)


 * TLT Trademark Law Treaty adopted on October 27, 1994,


 * WIPO Copyright Treaty (Geneva, 1996)


 * WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty 4 (Geneva, 1996)

PLT is a patent law multilateral treaty concluded on 1 June 2000 in Geneva, Switzerland, by 53 States and the European Patent Organisation (an intergovernmental organization). Its aim is to harmonize formal procedures such as the requirements to obtain a filing date for a patent application, the form and content of a patent application, and representation.
 * PLT The Patent Law Treaty (PLT)2000

Unbundling of software and hardware
When IBM unbundled software from computer hardware in 1969, it became common practice for software vendors to explicitly price software licenses.

In 1969, IBM "unbundled" software and services from hardware sales. Until this time, customers did not generally pay for software or services; software was provided at no additional charge, generally in source code form; services (systems engineering, education and training, system installation) were provided free of charge at the discretion of the IBM Branch office. This practice existed throughout the industry.

BSD
The earliest distributions of Unix from Bell Labs in the 1970s included the source code to the operating system, allowing researchers at universities to modify and extend Unix. The first Unix system at Berkeley was a PDP-11 installed in 1974, and the computer science department used it for extensive research thereafter.

BSD License
It was first used in 1980 for the Berkeley Source Distribution (BSD), also known as BSD UNIX, an enhanced version of the original UNIX operating system that was first written in 1969 by  Ken Thompson at Bell Labs.

BSD licenses represent a family of permissive free software licenses. The original was used for the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix-like operating system after which the license is named. The original owners of BSD were the Regents of the University of California because BSD was first written at the University of California, Berkeley. The first version of the license was revised, and the resulting licenses are more properly called modified BSD licenses. Permissive licenses, sometimes with important differences pertaining to license compatibility, are referred to as "BSD-style licenses". Several BSD-like licenses, including the New BSD license, have been vetted by the Open Source Initiative as meeting their definition of open source.

copyright law FAQ
The FAQ is here.

Copyright is valid as soon as work is fixed into form
As soon as you publish you work on a webpage, or even put it in a file, it is copyrighted.

Registration is not required
You do not need to register your work with the copyright office for it to be copyrighted.

Copyright Header is not required
If you do not declare the copyright in the file, it is still protected. If a file is lacking a header, it means that you need to seek permission to use it.

WIPO
WIPO_Copyright_Treaty World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty

In the treaty, software is protected, as well as databases. It also prevents the removal of the copy protection software.

DMCA
The DMCA is the US implementation of WIPO.

"The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act

Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act
Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (Safe harbor act) This protects ISPs from being responsible for their clients.

The Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA) is United States federal law that creates a conditional safe harbor for online service providers (OSPs, including Internet service providers) and other Internet intermediaries by shielding them from liability for the infringing acts of others. OCILLA was passed as a part of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and is sometimes referred to as the "Safe Harbor" provision or as "DMCA 512" because it added Section 512 to Title 17 of the United States Code. By exempting Internet intermediaries from copyright infringement liability provided they follow certain rules, OCILLA attempts to strike a balance between the competing interests of copyright owners and digital users

WIPO in Serbia
There seem to be no WIPO implementation in Kosovo. But serbia has in 2006 after kosovo was under UNMIK administration.

fair use
The Stanford Copyright & Fair Use website is a great source of information about fair use. "When in doubt as to the right to use or acknowledge a source, the most prudent course may be to seek permission of the copyright owner."

The fair usage article is great and should be read in total. Fair_use

Wikipedia has a page on what images are considered fair use.

Many images are included on the Wikipedia that are not free.

The has been discussions on if the headline of a story can be protected.

The copyright office states on fair use : """The distinction between fair use and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission. """

The valid usage of a copyrighted material are :
 * criticism - Parody and making fun of the original.
 * comment - commenting with your own words.
 * news reporting - reporting what happens.
 * teaching/documentaries - teaching in school. Non profit.

Even the usage of a John Lennon snippet in a documentary is valid.


 * scholarship/research - original works that studies other things.


 * 1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
 * 2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
 * 3) amount and substantially of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
 * 4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Code Snippets and Fair Use
Small snippets of code that can be easily re-written can be used from other programs.

Do I have “fair use” rights in using the source code of a GPL-covered program? Yes, you do. “Fair use” is use that is allowed without any special permission. Since you don't need the Developers' permission

Educational Purpose
"""Snippets of movies can be shown in the classrooms of public schools and non-profit educational institutions without a license pursuant to Section 110(1) of Title 17"""

Default Ownership of copyright
In the united states, the developer is the default owner of contract work.

In Kosovo, the company that payed for the work owns the rights.

Peer to Peer networks and infringment
If you are downloading from a P2P network, you can be considered a "direct infringer" and are infringing on the copyright holder's rights.

but the usage of such a copy as a lesser crime. the problem is that when you use a torrent, you are offering the content as well. this puts you into the criminal side.

During the early 2000s, the fight against copyright infringement expanded into lawsuits against individual users of file sharing software. File_sharing_and_the_law

A significant number of people share files in a way that infringes on the rights of copyright holders. Copyright holders have challenged the legality of file sharing networks. This has led to litigation by industry bodies against certain private individual file sharers.

See also

using header files, fair use
A header file commonly contains forward declarations of classes, subroutines, variables, and other identifiers.

the *only* way to use a header file is to include it in a source file, and compile and copy the resultant output. Note that you cannot run a program without copying it. It's physically impossible.

System header files declare the interfaces to parts of the operating system. You include them in your program to supply the definitions and declarations you need to invoke system calls and libraries.

It seems that most of the people on this list have forgotten their compiler design course. If the kernel file only contains things like variable declarations and function prototypes then it will NOT end up in the object code after compilation. It will be used to inform the compiler of things like how much memory to set aside for a particular variable or to make sure that the correct number of arguments are passed to a function in the correct order. None of that type of "code" from a ".h" file ends up in the executable (unless  debugging code is left in - but that's a little bit of a different story).

Header files that define APIs but don't directly produce binary output code by themselves are a gray area; it's sloppy of us to have those as GPL instead of LGPL anyway, but compiling against header files probably falls under fair use since the programmer did make a distinction between .h and .c files, and being included in other programs to allow interoperability with this bit of code is what .h files are FOR

The LesserGPL allows you to use the structure and layout information of the code from the header files without infringement. Object Code Incorporating Material from Library Header Files. The object code form of an Application may incorporate material from a header file that is part of  the Library. You may convey such object code under terms of your choice, provided that, if the incorporated material is not limited to numerical parameters, data structure layouts and accessors, or small macros, inline functions and templates (ten or fewer lines in length), you do both of the following: * a) Give prominent notice with each copy of the object code that the Library is used in it and that the Library and its use are covered by this License.   * b) Accompany the object code with a copy of the GNU GPL and this license document.

Copyright law does not protect idea, just the expression of them. Several court decisions have been rendered which suggest that the 'purely functional' elements of a computer program are not copyrightable. There are several cases that explicitly deal with the issue of copyright and header files. The most relevant one for Wine development is probably the 1992 decision in Sega v. Accolade, where Accolade reverse engineered the headers for Sega's ROM libraries in order to  develop games compatible with Sega's hardware without paying Sega's royalties.

avoiding patents
For software freedom to be maintained, it must also resist the siren call of patented software. It is important to avoid using any patented software so that you can maintain your freedom in the future.

Large corporations have failed to cripple linuxs development with patents starting back in 2003.

SCO claimed "the majority owner of Unix intellectual property" and "has full rights to license this technology, and enforce the associated patents and copyrights."

Currently Microsofts patents are sneaking their way into the Linux distributions

Linux Defenders “Defensive Publications” that codify ‘known’ inventions that have not previously been patented so that they can be brought to the attention of the patent office to ensure that later developed patent applications claiming such inventions do not issue. In general, defensive publications are a vehicle which allows the Linux and broader open source community to create valuable prior art that enables Linux and freedom of action/freedom to operate for those active in utilizing Linux to drive innovation in products, services, and applications

Prior art for a patent (application) means anything published before the filing date of the patent which describes the same or a similar invention.

Without software patents, Europe could save costs, foster innovation, enhance security, and create jobs. Thanks to Linux and other open-source software, Europe has the chance to gain independence from Microsoft and other large American companies. However, if the EU allows software patents, then that's the beginning of the end for Linux. Not only for Linux. It's just a prominent example.

What is Open Invention Network ? Open Invention Network’s mission is to further software innovation by acquiring patents to be used for cross-licensing purposes to defend the Linux System - making them available on a royalty-free basis. http://www.open-mag.com/02873583279.shtml

Creating Prior Art
The one way to fight patents is first also to create new ideas and publish them first. Open source implementations of ideas can be produced faster and cheaper and released faster then proprietary ones. The software, when published will keep those ideas from being patented.

Prior art in most systems of patent law, constitutes all information that has been made available to the public in any form before a given date that might be relevant to a patent's claims of originality. If an invention has been described in prior art, a patent on that invention is not valid.

copyright law in USA
Copyright protects the particular way an author has expressed himself. It does not extend to any ideas, systems, or factual information conveyed in the work. The safest course is always to get permission from the copyright owner before using copyrighted material. The Copyright Office cannot give this permission. When it is impracticable to obtain permission, use of copyrighted material should be avoided unless the doctrine of fair use would clearly apply to the situation. The Copyright Office can neither determine if a certain use may be considered fair nor advise on possible copyright violations. If there is any doubt, it is advisable to consult an attorney.

copyright law in kosovo
6. Special measures of protection Article 126. As infringements of Copyright in a computer program shall be deemed also: a).    any distribution, including the offering for use,  of one or several copies of a computer program, knowing or having reason to believe, that it is an infringing copy; or b). the possession, for commercial purposes, of a copy of a computer program, knowing or having reason to believe, that it is an infringing copy.

copyleft
"Copyleft is a play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of a work for others and requiring that the same freedoms be preserved in modified versions."

copyleft — noun: 1. A copyleft license, 2. The act of licensing under a copyleft license — verb: 1. To license under a copyleft license — adjective: 1. (Of a license allowing use of a copyrighted work) Allowing use, distribution, and modification on the condition that any redistributions

Copyright infringement
"Copyright infringement (or copyright violation) is the unauthorized use of material that is covered by copyright law, in a manner that violates one of the copyright owner's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make [...]" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement

Creative_commons
"Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share."

Creative Commons has been described as being at the forefront of the copyleft movement, which seeks to support the building of a richer public domain by providing an alternative to the automatic "all rights reserved" copyright, dubbed "some rights reserved." David Berry and Giles Moss have credited Creative Commons with generating interest in the issue of intellectual property and contributing to the re-thinking of the role of the "commons" in the "information age". Beyond that, Creative Commons has provided "institutional, practical and legal support for   individuals and groups wishing to experiment and communicate with culture more freely."

Creative Commons works to counter what the organization considers to be a dominant and increasingly restrictive permission culture. According to Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, it is "a culture in which creators  get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past". Lessig maintains that modern culture is dominated by traditional content distributors in order to maintain and strengthen their monopolies on cultural products such as popular music and popular cinema, and that Creative Commons can provide alternatives to these restrictions.

free software licenses
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_licence

GPL
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0-standalone.html

GPL How to
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html

OSI
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a non-profit corporation formed to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source and to build bridges among different constituencies in the open-source community.

OSI was founded inFebruary 1998, by Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond, prompted by Netscape Communications Corporation publishing the source code for its flagship Netscape Communicator product. Later, in August 1998 the organization added a board of directors.

De_minimis
If the copyright infringement was too small, then the courts will not be interested.

De minimis is a Latin expression meaning about minimal things, normally in the phrases de minimis non curat praetor or   de minimis non curat lex meaning that the law is not interested in trivial matters.

creative commons
"Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share."

All rights dispersed
http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/nimustext.html

Wikipedia
1. problems with wikipedia in kosovo.

software license
"A software license (or software licence in commonwealth usage) is a legal instrument governing the usage or redistribution of copyright protected software."

Trademark infringement
"Trademark infringement is a violation of the exclusive rights attaching to a trademark without the authorization of the trademark owner or any licensees (provided that such authorization was within the scope of the license)." -

Copyright_infringement_of_software
"The copyright infringement of software (often referred to as software piracy) refers to several practices which involve the unauthorized copying of computer software." -

Enforcement
Infringment (piracy) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement_of_software http://www.fastiis.org/our_services/education/TheLaw/" About The Federation against Software Theft & Investors in Software

Do's and Dont's
The dos and donts of copyright :

do not call someone elses work your own. do cite and refer to others people work giveing them credit.

do not copy and distribute other peoples work without permission. do link to that work and show people where they can get it. do prefer to use public domain, creative commons and GPL sources that allow you to copy them.

do not use software that you have no rights to. do use public domain, open source, creative commons and GPL sources that allow you to use them without restriction. do be careful of software that you do not have source to, it could contain virus and bugs that you cannot fix. do be careful of yearly payments for new versions.

do not own copies of music that you did not buy. do own copies of public domain and creative commons. do have private copies of internet radio shows, but dont redistribute them.

do not offer copies of other peoples work to anyone without permission. do distribute copyleft materials. do publish your own creative work under copyleft.

do not expect new or different versions software to work as before. do test software in a test environment before using it widely.

funny quotes
Java is called, write once test everywhere. there is no such thing as portable software, only ported software.

what is creativity
The raising of the energy level of information, can be called negative entropy or intelligence.

creative process
the creative process of software development.

The analysis of data, collection of input. understanding of information merging in together. creative reproduction versus copying.

Facts
Facts are not copyrightable. Names are not copyrightable, but can be trademarked/service marked.

collections of public domain facts can be protected in europe as a collection.

Reverse Engineering for Maps

 * Comparison of works.

You can aquire a legal copy of a work for comparison. For example you can compare maps to see if there are things missing from one map or the other.

Usage of copyrighted works as reference. Citation and not copying of copyrighted material. Fair usage of quotations and samples.

Depending on the license of the webpage, you might be able to use them for testing or modeling the data.
 * Screen scraping of webpages, collecting of inputs and outputs.

you can model a system by creating test cases. Doing so is very legal and is no infringment.
 * creation of test cases for comparing software.

That is basically creating test data.
 * Running of software and extracting data.

Again, normally you should be able to measure and compare the performance of programs.
 * Benchmarking of software performance.

Comparing maps is legal, copying them is illegal. A person can learn something from a map comparison, and tell someone else who has not seen the map. That third person can then create new map elements based on the new description. This is clean room reverse engineering.
 * Overlays of two maps.

all of the above mentioned usages for reverse engineering can be limited via EULA and other contractes outside of copyright laws.
 * EULA and other additional contracts.

Also you should not copy data from other sources because if can be wrong or misleading. Putting in false data into a map or database is a good way to protect it from copying.

Copyright protects the embodiment of an idea. When you create a new form for the data it is no longer the same thing.

Automatic translations can be considered copies, also translations as well.

thanks
I would like to thank the following people from #gnu for reviewing and thier suggestions.


 * drake3 (dion rasmussen)
 * rindolf User:Shlomif
 * leo_rockway