our little daemon abused as symbol of the evil

[Bernd Walter]

On Tue, Feb 09, 2010 at 01:27:16PM +0100, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> "Julian H. Stacey" <jhs at berklix.com> writes:
> > I asked someone who registers trademarks as part of her job:
> > 	One can apply to register a trademark in {(my (Julian) brackets) at
> > 	least all of} Germany Britain America {etc}.  She spoke of
> > 	an international form where one ticks the countries one
> > 	wants {to apply to}.
> >
> > I recall there's initial & recuring fees (& admin) on getting &
> > renewing trademarks.  So questions could be:
> > 	Has Kirk (or A.N.Other) registered it [which, what] as a
> > 	trademark ?  In which countries ?  When ? URLs please.
> > 	Have they already/ when will they expire 
> > 	Whose crontab file reminder who Kirk ? to pay renewal
> > 	fees [to which countries] ?
> 
> There is no need to register a trademark.  Kirk owns the *copyright* to
> the image, which is valid world-wide at no cost.  As the copyright
> holder, Kirk gets to decide who is and isn't allowed to use the image
> and for what purpose.

There is no copyright in Germany.
But there is a protection for the author of arts (called Urheberrecht)
for simmilar purpose.
I'm not a lawyer, but there are many differences to copyright and I
think the main one is that the German system automatically protects
without the need to explicitly declare copyright.
E.g. there is not need to add copyright lines in sourcecode to prohibit
others to republish your code in Germany.
Many German authors use copyright only for international purpose or just
because they don't know better.
Another difference (to my knowledge) is that the author never looses his
right (though there are a few rules about age and inheritage) - no
matter how much it is spread.
The author can't even sell it, all he can do is sell the right to use it.

> I'm tempted to say that those researchers' use of the daemon is a
> shocking display of lack of respect for intellectual property, if I
> didn't already know far too well that most scientists are not only
> completely clueless about IP but do not even understand it when you
> explain it to them.

This is one thing.
The other thing is that people use it as avatar pictures or other
completely unrelated purpose.
You can easily loose copyright and trademarks if you don't care about
it, but you don't loose your author rights.
Since this is a german magazine it doesn't matter if there is a copyright
stamp on it or not and it doesn't matter if it is widespread used or not.
They always need to get an agreement from the author - at least if they
publish the full art, which they did.

-- 
B.Walter <bernd at bwct.de> http://www.bwct.de
Modbus/TCP Ethernet I/O Baugruppen, ARM basierte FreeBSD Rechner uvm.