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Poster:	garthus1	Date:	Sep 2, 2015 6:40am
Forum:	texts	Subject:	Reply To An Interesting Message On Copyright

Reply To An Interesting Message On Copyright I just received this Email: “Hello, I don't understand how you think the John Deere technical manuals that have clear copyright notifications from the 1980's and 1990's are free of copyright? Can you help me understand the way you have interpreted the copyright law which allows you to make these documents freely available to the public? It appears to me they are owned by The John Deere Company. Can you help?” Thank you, Bob Mills. Bob, Basically, this is the way that it works in most cases. Even if a proper copyright notice was attached before March 1989 and afterwords when the law allows for automatic copyright without notice; the Copyright gives intellectual Property rights. Yes that does apply to copying for profit and not-for-profit, technically all copying would be a violation. However, morally, copying and selling for a profit is definitely not something i would do or sanction. On the other hand, reproducing for archival or educational purposes, while technically a violation of the law, is not a moral violation if there is no profit in the reproduction. There are 'very' little materials by the way which I have put up that would fall into those categories, I will go out of my way to honor the Copyright hogs' wishes who do not want their materials reproduced … I have said on numerous occasions throw them in the trash … hide them from the public, that is the so-called creators right. Ideas are only useful if they can be propagated and not necessarily for profit. However if you read the copyright statutes carefully, the intellectual property holder (often not the real creator by the way, in today's techno-corporate culture); has the right to ask me or anyone else who has posted information which they claim intellectual property rights on, to remove those items from public view. Then of course they would come down … but I do not think that giving John Deere free advertising by posting some manuals, is hurting their business in any way. I actually have materials (and intend to post others) up which they do not even have in their Archives. The process however gets even more convoluted, if the item is not removed, John Deere would have to take civil action against the person committing the infraction and that would involve registering the item with the Copyright Office, and then they would have a legal claim. By the way most modern videos (movies as they are called), are registered so the rights holders do have legal recourse immediately, but they still would have to give notice to the so-called infraction and give the infractor the choice to remove the materials. Many items with legal copyright notice were never registered, and if for example, the organization disappears, then we have an Orphan Work, which leads to another convoluted set of problems. I think in nearly 20 years, I have only had two requests to remove items, and one I removed even though I could have probably fought it, since I have little use (it was a video) for narcissistic people who take pride in pushing their so-called intellectual property rights when they understand little about what being an intellectual is. Often the equation is simply about them adding more millions to their billions. The other, I asked for proof that they were indeed the copyright holder and they could not provide it … often-times the creator is not the copyright holder and unless a transfer of rights has taken place, they have no legal control over their creation. In closing, I have never said that items you have described are free of copyright, only that I will work within the full extent of the law (loopholes included) to liberate information from the brainwashed ideas of this corporate-technocratic plutocracy which calls itself a democracy. It was not uncommon for works before 1963 to have copyright notices, which were never filed by the owners. This was a much more responsible system, not the crap which exists today which protects the most banal of utterances with so-called intellectual property rights for 125 years in some cases. Everything that I write or utter is in the Public Domain, it would be a much better world if people were not so brainwashed by this ownership mentality. I am providing John Deere a useful service, if they want to complain about it, we can talk about it publicly, I guarantee, they will be the loser in the long-run if everything they claim to have rights to is taken off the Internet. They probably do not make much revenue from selling their manuals and the question would be if all the adverse publicity which they would get were worth the legal costs. I will have no legal costs because I can defend myself in Court and have done so in the past. I understand the warped and convoluted copyright statutes better than most, and can say unequivocally that they were written in ways which only convoluted and warped minds could have thought of. After all what value-added does our government or its laws really provide to our culture or economy, Copyright Statutes are an example of an anachronistic set of rules designed to benefit the major publishing, entertainment and educational parisitocracies; and not as the brainwashed minions in academia may think, primarily the creators of such works. Gerry Garthus 31 August 2015.
This post was modified by garthus1 on 2015-09-01 01:17:40
This post was modified by garthus1 on 2015-09-01 01:20:20
This post was modified by garthus1 on 2015-09-02 13:40:29