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Miloslav Ciz 2025-08-16 19:22:10 +02:00
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copyright.md
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@ -32,6 +32,9 @@ A work which is not covered by copyright (and any other IP) -- which is nowadays
**Copyright encourages murder.** The sooner the author dies, the sooner his material will run out of copyright, so if you want some nice work to enter public domain soon, you are literally led by the law to try for him to die as soon as possible.
A commonly used **trick for legally bypassing copyright restrictions** is to use [patches](patch.md). It can help legally modify proprietary works and distribute these modifications by publishing ONLY the changes without redistributing the copyrighted work along. Say there is for example a proprietary video game with [ads](marketing.md) in it and some good programmer decides to modify the game and remove the ads -- like a good human he would subsequently like to share this modified game with others to spare them of suffering from the advertisement torture, but he can't publicly upload the modified version anywhere because it's a derivative work (a modification of something "owned" by someone else), the copyright belongs not to him but to the game company and that can order an instant takedown of this version and even punish the uploader with a lawsuit. What he can do instead is to publish only a patch, a set of changes that can be automatically applied to the original game to create the modified ad-free version. This patch can legally be distributed because it's technically not a derivative work, it's an original code not containing the game, it's just a set of instruction saying how to remove ads from the video game. To obtain the modified ad-free version it is therefore necessary to already own the original version, but this is still a better situation than not being able to have an ad-free video game at all. This technique works very well and patches are even a very elegant way of sharing that saves bandwidth and storage, but it's true there may be some potential hurdles we have to watch for. For instance the patch MAY sometimes end up legally constituting a derivative work -- imagine for example a fan-fiction patch that can be applied to a [Harry Potter](harry_potter.md) book to obtain a longer, more detailed version of the book; this specific patch will probably have to carry with it new text that contains copyrightable elements such as characters and parts of the original plot. So in summary patches are awesome in bypassing some restrictions, but ultimately do not solve the copyright problem.
## Step By Step Instructions For Dummies To Determine Copyright Status Etc.
DISCLAIMER: Fuck you.