As I said
Get Real's posts are always good for a laugh.
This made me roll around with laughter :
'Are you by any chance comparing the simplicity of Copyright law with the complexity Human Rights laws?'
Simplicity ?!!! If it was so simple Get Real why aren 't the corporate lawyers banging on your door demanding your wisdom and counsel. You could make a fortune explaining to those highly paid highly qualified corporate dim-wits what copyright and public domain means, I'm sure they'd love to know how simple it is.
Get Real then gives an attempt to define copyright and public domain by referring to US law, as if US law was definitive : it is not. And even if it was, it is not simple and is constantly contested (look at the massive expansion of IP litigation in the last fifteen years in the US). Copyright is just one part of IP (intellectual property) law and there are massive variations between jurisdictions. But I'm not sure Get Real actually read his own link on public domain which says, in contradiction to what he just claimed,
There is no easy method to determine whether a work is in the public domain because the laws are complex and have changed numerous times over the years
[my emphasis]
That's why I said "authors" ....
What ? The plural makes a difference ? Pray tell us what difference ?
The reason I repeated the distinction between civil and criminal law is because people were posting comments as if a breach of copyright could automatically trigger a criminal action or that it was open to those who did not hold copyright to take action. Typically this is not an available path.
On the one hand s/he posts this :
If I ever post something that is NOT fact just let me know... because that's all that matters to me.
But a couple of posts earler he posted this :
Copperline have bitten off more than they can chew suggesting that Turkish Cypriots don’t have copyright protection because they live under an unrecognized entity… as if the entity “TRNC” owns their work!
But this is not a fact since I did not say nor make any reference to the TRNC owning work. So this is not a fact. It is Get Real's supposition and speculation. (I fear that Get Real has trouble with the basic idea of what constitutes a 'fact' and what constitutes idle and baseless speculation).
Then also
Get Real posts this :
Are you trying to justify copyright violations with the classic... "everyone's doing it!"
No, I didn't say anything of the sort. Get Real simply made this up and trfied to attribute it to me. Far from him being only concerned with 'fact' his typical strategy in this forum is to attribute meanings, interpretations, motives, and conclusions which the original poster has never written. S/he substitute what people have actually written for his own self-serving prejudices.
Oh, and
Get Real, the reason for my occasional posts on this forum is that (a) I have a very interesting full time job, (b) I have a family, (c) I have an interesting social life, (d) I live in a beautiful part of Cyprus with other ordinary Cypriots and do not have time (nor interest) in spending hundreds of hours posting in an internet forum. In other words, unlike you it seems, I have a first life.
