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copyright.md
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@ -16,6 +16,8 @@ The book *Free Culture* by Lessig talks, besides others, about how copyright has
Copyright rules differ greatly by country, most notably the US measures copyright length from the publication of the work rather than from when the author died. It is possible for a work to be copyrighted in one country and not copyrighted in another. It is sometimes also very difficult to say whether a work is copyrighted because the rules have been greatly changing (e.g. a notice used to be required for some time), sometimes even retroactively copyrighting public domain works, and there also exists no official database of copyrighted works (you can't safely look up whether your creation is too similar to someone else's). All in all, copyright is a huge mess, which is why we choose [free licenses](free_software.md) and even [public domain](public_domain.md) waivers.
In some countries copyright terrorists already establishes a kind of tax that is paid when buying a storage device such as a USB stick -- it is now assumed the device will be used to share copyrighted material so you pay extra money in advance to copyright holders for this crime you are found guilty of before you commit it. Welcome to [21st century](21st_century.md).
[Copyleft](copyleft.md) (also share-alike) is a concept standing against copyright, a kind of anti-copyright, invented by [Richard Stallman](rms.md) in the context of [free software](free_software.md). It's a license that grants people the rights to the author's work on the condition that they share its further modification under the same terms, which basically [hacks](hacking.md) copyright to effectively spread free works like a "virus".
Copyright does **not** (or at least should not) apply to facts (including mathematical formulas) (even though the formulation of them may be copyrighted), ideas (though these may be covered by [patents](patent.md)) and single words or short phrases (these may however still be [trademarked](trademark.md)) and similarly trivial works. As such copyright can't e.g. be applied to game mechanics of a computer [game](game.md) (it's an idea). It is also basically proven that copyright doesn't cover [computer languages](programming_language.md) (Oracle vs Google). Also even though many try to claim so, copyright does NOT arise for the effort needed to create the work -- so called "sweat of the brow" -- some say that when it took a great effort to create something, the author should get a copyright on it, however this is NOT and must NOT be the case (otherwise it would be possible to copyright mere ideas, simple mathematical formulas, rules of games etc.). Depending on time and location there also exist various peculiar exceptions such as the freedom of panorama for photographs or uncopyrightable utilitarian design (e.g. no one can own the shape of a generic car). But it's never good to rely on these peculiarities as they are specific to time/location, they are often highly subjective, fuzzy and debatable and may even be retroactively changed by law. This constitutes a huge legal [bloat](bloat.md) and many time legal unsafety. Do not stay in the gray area, try to stay safely far away from the fuzzy copyright line.