Iron-clad Legal Copyright (Ftrain.com)

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Friday, May 5, 2000

Iron-clad Legal Copyright

You don't own me, although I am another on of your little toys.

These are my words. I am Paul Ford, I live in Brooklyn, and I wrote them. I have had all kinds of ideas in the past about Free-software style licenses for writing and encouraging people to just take this stuff and do whatever they want with it, publish it on their Web sites, or see if they can sell it, and so on, but I don't want to do that anymore. Writing is not software.

Still, feel free to do things with them. Send them out in lists, use them as a term paper, put them in a zine. Credit is due, and it keeps my spirits up. I am greedy to write that I deserve credit, as an amateur, but when people just steal, without giving credit, I feel lousy. There's not much I can do about it. I am powerless in this domain, and you control things, you will be the one making the decisions about how these words filter through your brain. Good lukc [sic].

I wish I lived in a world without copyrights. But without a world of copyrights would we have public transportation? None of the works of the world provides a clear answer.