Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!amdcad!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!dan-hankins
From: dan-hankins@cup.portal.com (Daniel B Hankins)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: FREE Software, PD, and author compensation
Message-ID: <12958@cup.portal.com>
Date: 26 Dec 88 04:58:14 GMT
References: <12748@cup.portal.com> <3126@sugar.uu.net> <12825@cup.portal.com> <3148@sugar.uu.net>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 25

In article <3148@sugar.uu.net> peter@sugar.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:

>>>This is an interesting argument, since it's saying "You have the rights
>>>to your own intellectual property, except that you can't sell it. You
>>>can license it or rent it under any terms you like, but you can't sell
>>>it."
>>      No, that's not what I'm saying.
>No, but that's what the Berne Convention is saying. That's the only part
>of your discussion I excerpted, and that's all I'm talking about.

     Oh.  I'm sorry, I misunderstood.  Your article sounded to me like you
thought I was advocating piracy, which of course I wasn't.

     I didn't know that the Berne convention said that.  I only had heard
about the one part about author's rights, and my understanding of it was
that one could not *in advance* sign away one's rights to future creations.
One could, of course, sell or sign away the rights to individual creations
after they are made.

     I'd certainly like to know more about the Berne convention in general,
and what it means to us lowly programmers slaving our minds away for the
big corporations.


Dan Hankins