Legal

It has been not long back that Google made a move to acquire DoubleClick. This sent waves of different emotions through out the blogosphere and internet in general. Google has been grown to such an extent under such a short time, that it is faced with quite a varied palette of reactions for every action it takes.

I stumbled across this topic, when I was researching the topic of Photoshop Vs GIMP.

April 23, is the day that UNESCOhas chosen to be the World Book And Copyright Day.

By celebrating this Day throughout the world, UNESCO seeks to promote reading, publishing and the protection of intellectual property through copyright.

I thought I would not write about it again for quite some time, but I feel compelled to. It is about copyright owned by artists, writers and others over the works they have created; and about other people using it without permission.

I get up this morning. It is a nice Saturday morning that I planned to spend by lazing around and doing some good original work for Splat.

It is odd and weird when I see what a minority of people do - act without honor. They say that imitation must be taken as flattery but I do not know how I should be taking this.

This particular series of incidents happened by January end, and here is a summary of the things in a chronological order.

I came to know of an alarming bill that was submitted in the US legislation through this post at Public Knowledge. I say it is an alarming bill because if the bill passes the houses and becomes a law then all the works of artists who reside outside United States, and in some cases even with in, would find themselves at loss.

This post seemingly comes in the right moment, after the posts on copyright and creative commons licenses. I found out about Lisensa through the blog post by Darren Rowse.

Well, here is something that I promised myself I would write about in my other post about Copyrights. A copyright restricts the distribution of any work and also distribution of any modifications to such works.

There are other types of licenses, where one can release their works under public domain or other creative common licenses. These are done with the motive of increasing creativity, and general propagation of works among the mass.

This post is a direct result of some discussions I had with Thilak over at TechBuzz. There was an incident of plagiarism by a person, and Thilak could, after some effort get a public apology. And later, we had some discussion over at another thread of his, where a harmless looking picture of Bart Simpson was used.