Eccentric Flower:199810/protecting my brainwork
From Eccentric Flower
«October 1998 «Eccentric Flower
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thirteen october ninety eight one p m protecting my brainwork Later than usual. It's been a weird morning. I did some nastiness to my ankle and had to turn around and go home. Don't worry, no real damage, just sore. The first of many, I'm sure; I generally manage to strain a muscle somewhere below the hips at least once a week in ice-slipping season, which is only a few short weeks away .... Anyway, then I worked for a while from here, but stopped to check my mail and found someone in my mailbox griping to a civil-liberties-type mailing list about Senate bill 505, which extends all the copyright durations for twenty more years. Copyright in this country's very generous: it exists from the moment you create the work ("fix it in tangible form") until fifty years after you die. Now it'll be seventy years after you die. Seem ridiculous? Maybe, maybe not. What if your royalties are the only thing supporting your widow and kids? Basically, there are a few places where my "information wants to be free" side conficts with my sense of value-received, and that's when I sense something endangering my creative property. I am fiercely protective of creative property. The way I see it, my mind is the only tool I have. It is what I make my living with. I should have primacy on all works which spring from my mind. I get to make money on them before anyone else does, and no one else can have them for free until I am no longer able to make money from them. And I don't think that's unreasonable. Work-for-hire is another matter; that's an agreement I enter voluntarily, where I am trading away some rights for easy cash. Most of the programming I do every day is, in essence, work-for-hire, and that's OK with me. In that arena, I have chosen to sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. (There. That's your obscure reference for today - collect the whole series! Get 'em while you can! Card #1, The Allegory Of The Cave, is already SOLD OUT!) Speaking of intellectual property, I'm working on a new story. I hope to have a link up for it this afternoon. Now, will I be making money from this story? No. Do I anticipate I will be making money from it later? No. If I thought it was profitable, I certainly wouldn't put it up on the web to get stolen. (How's THAT for anti-freedom-of-information?) Nonetheless, I'd still be really annoyed to find it on some other site, or reprinted somewhere, without my permission. So clearly it's not just money. There's something deeper at work there. It's probably like the notice on the story page says: It's mine, I made it, and I'm the only one who gets to decide what happens to it.
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