the Creative Commons license, mark twain, and SCO- oh my!

i just read an interesting article on ars technica. it talks of how mark twain/samuel clemens supported copyright, but not for the reasons you’d think.

a quote, “[H]e [mark twain] knew that his works would likely continue to be popular long after their (then) 42 years of copyright protection expired. Maybe this wouldn’t have bothered Twain much were it not for the fact that he was convinced that public domain works were nothing more than free source materials for publishers to pick up, print, and make money on (without paying an author). Twain feared that publishers would continue to print his works without paying him, and thus they’d continue to rake in the dough while his heirs got none. And, as Twain once noted, while authors die, ‘publishers’ don’t. For their efforts, Twain called them ‘pirates,’ for they did as true pirates do: ‘take’ things that aren’t ‘theirs’ and profit from it.”

EXACTLY. this is why i think mark twain would support the GPL, and the Creative Commons licenses- it would aim to  protect the rights of the “author” so that they were not abused by publishers, and still allowed the people to enjoy their works. it would leave the rights over content, et. al. completely in the hands of the contributor and not the distributor. it’s time to put those distributors in their place, their heads have gotten rather large.

and while we’re on the topic of copyright (or copyleft, etc.), it turns out in an interesting twist of fate that SCO doesn’t even OWN the copyright to Unix, and owes NOVELL money! the irony, the humour!

i still have hope for america’s judicial system. i just hope novell doesn’t go power-hungry and start going after the throat of linux and GNU.

here are my favourite highlights:

“Confirmation of Novell’s ownership of the UNIX copyrights will also put an end to SCO’s lawsuit against IBM, in which SCO alleges that IBM infringed on UNIX copyrights by incorporating proprietary UNIX code into the open-source Linux operating system.” (emphasis added)

“Judge Kimball has ruled that SCO owes Novell 95 percent of the royalties generated by the licensing of Novell’s UNIX copyrights. The two most prominent SCO licensees are Microsoft and Sun, both of which develop operating systems that compete directly with Linux.” (emphasis added)

HAHAHA.

i’m laughing so hard.