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Copyright
Recently I
made a promise to the public, which included placing my books
under the Founder's Copyright.
And as promised, I made Underdetermination
of Science - Part I: The Relation Between Formal Science and Natural
Science be under the Founder's Copyright.
What does this mean? It means that I do
not own my book's Copyright, instead Creative Commons
Corporation is the owner. Why would I sell
for $1.00 my Copyright to Creative Commons? Very simple.
Creative Commons and I have entered into an agreement which
basically states the following:
- I sold my Copyright to Creative
Commons Corporation for the price of $1.00.
- Creative Commons Corporation will grant
me an exclusive license, even with respect to Creative Commons, to
publish and profit from my work. It will be up to me to
determine how my work will be licensed, how it will be distributed and
sold either in bookstores or online.
- I will have this exclusive license for a
period of 14 years, which can be renewed for another 14 years.
- After the license expires, the contract
stipulates that my work will enter into the public domain.
Like all of Creative Commons licenses,
the Founder's Copyright is a hack to Copyright Law. I do not
believe that anyone should have a Copyright on their work for a
lifetime plus seventy years.
First, the purpose of Copyright is not to be intellectual
property (as many people claim), but to be an incentive for the
creation of works. However, since books are important
cultural means to provide knowledge to the public, it is important that
they have access to knowledge. It is the destiny of all
commercial cultural works to place them in the public domain.
I know that maybe 30 to 50 years of Copyright can be
reasonable, but no longer than 50 years. Today we have a lot
of valuable works which could be now available on the Internet, and yet
they are not, because they are trapped by Copyright Law, which has
extended the Copyright to an absurdly long period of time.
More than 90% of old copyrighted works are not circulating,
nor are being published, nor are they producing money to any companies
and authors. These works could have been in the public domain
providing knowledge, art, and music to the public.
To avoid this, I look at the original Copyright laws approved by the
U.S. Congress: the first copyright law approved by the
United States which granted 14 years of Copyright to the authors, which
could be extended by another 14 years if requested by the authors, and
then the work enters into the public domain.
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