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Old Feb 21, 2012, 05:36 AM
LiquidAcid LiquidAcid is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Phonograph View Post
I can be wrong (correct me with proof if so) but copyrights must be paid to be copyrights no?
because in that case, it's only intellectual property for authors and anybody could use it, rearrange it etc no?
And you're wrong. You don't have to transfer any monetary payment to acquire copyright for your own work. You create a piece of work and then you define yourself the type of copyright.

Example: Write a piece of sourcecode, and then license it under the (probably well-known) GPL General Public License. This defines the copyright for this piece of work. GNU likes to call this copyleft, because the copyright isn't very restrictive, but it's still a copyright in the legal sense. See Copyleft for the details of the copyright in the GPL.

And yes, this works the same for music and any kind of media. All under the assumption that the work is self-published. When a publisher/distributor comes into play, then things might look different because the author is probably going to transfer certain rights over to the publisher.

Last edited by LiquidAcid; Feb 21, 2012 at 05:38 AM.
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