Martin Burnicki <martin.burnicki@meinberg.de> writes:
Agreed. I'm still wondering why it is so hard to say, "here is the file I've created, do with it what you want". ;-)
Years of legal effort by (mostly, but not exclusively) corporations to make copyright restrictions the expected default, following the discovery that a lot of valuable property entered the public domain because someone didn't follow the precise (and varying-by-country) legal forms to ensure that it didn't. It's frustrating for our purposes, but some of the stories of the loss of rights and, subsequently, money in the pre-Berne era from people like mid-list fiction authors who failed to follow the right legal procedure or who got tricked into signing very bad contracts are pretty compelling. The law was written in consideration of those people, not for software or for files like this, so it applies rather awkwardly. -- Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>