[OS X TeX] gtamacfonts ligatures: PDF searchability

[Maarten Sneep]

Going very OT.

On 29 Mar 2006, at 2:49, Alain Schremmer wrote:

> Maarten Sneep wrote:
>
>> The copyright owner has all rights to a work, and can set the  
>> standards.
>
> Not exactly: there is no "copyright law", by divine right or  
> otherwise. There are the "copyright laws" that some people get  
> passed but that others don't or can't. If you wrote a verse or two,  
> or took a picture, or devised an algorithm, you can get it  
> protected for the next century or two—by copyright or patent law.  
> You can even patent somebody else's cells. (See Scientific American  
> for details.) If you prove a theorem …. tough luck. Or maybe the  
> AMS is going to use its muscle …

please, don't. OTOH, if you write that theorem down, the article in  
which you do so is protected by the copyright laws.

>> (think GPL),
>
> I thought that the point of the GPL is to prevent others to  
> copyright the works and thus lock them up.

The point of the GPL is to protect your freedom. It does this by  
using copyright laws to grant the right to copy the material to  
anyone, under the condition that you give the same rights to others  
as well. (Short version, read teh whole license, it is actually  
pretty clever, and readable). Without the existence of copyright  
laws, the GPL wouldn't work.

>> so blaming copyright law itself is not correct either.
>
> In the US, copyright law has changed vastly over the past thirty  
> years or so in order to "protect intellectual property" with an  
> immense extension of the concept of "intellectual property", all in  
> the name, of course, of freedom but bordering, if not exceeding,  
> the absurd.

Since I own my own brain (I think), the mere thought of a company  
having "Intelectual Property" is absurd. They can have the rights for  
patents (even software or business methods in the US. Patently  
absurd), they can own copyrights to certain works, and I think there  
were two more categories (hey, it is getting late here).

Both the duration of the protection, and the allowed remedies are  
getting absurd in many cases, even so far as to threatening the  
future readability of creative output. It seems that right now, about  
50 % of the music written since the 1940ies is no longer available  
commercially, but the owners don't allow other copying either.

Point is: intelectual property is a grab-bag term, and can lead to  
confusion.

> There is a well documented—if a bit disorganized—book on the  
> subject: The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between  
> Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the  
> System by Siva Vaidhyanathan.

Thanks, may be at a later moment...

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