Re: Author rights

On Wed, Jul 05, 2000 at 03:43:30PM -0700, Philippe Converset wrote:
> Is there a way of copyrighting a svg file ?

<!-- This file is copyright Fred Bloggs <fred@bloggsoft.com> 2000 --!>

> I mean, how an author can be sure that his work will not be modified without
> his authorization ?

You can't. But then, you never can really. If you are going to
distribute files, you are going to give people the opportunity to change
them.

You could always have a "click here to agree" to my ridiculous terms of
viewing page.

> The big advantage of the Flash format is that the file can not be
> edited without the source.  thus author rights are respected.

I shall avoid the topic of whether holding back source materials and
publishing only the final products is moral, as this doesn't look like
alt.gnu.advocacy. But, I am sure software exists to reverse engineer
flash files, I have seen a flash to SVG converter, so I guess that
editors must exist.

> If you, reader, are an author, will you turn from Flash to SVG if
> there is no more copyright on your work ?

Publishing source and final formats for a work does not relinquish the
creators copyright. It just makes it easier for people who are going to
modify your work to do it.

> I'm afraid that SVG might not be used for real content like "web cartoon"
> because of this lack of copyright. I hope not !

I would hardly call "web cartoons" *real content*, I can think of much
better uses for SVG.

Imagine a scenario, you create your cartoon in Adobe Illustrator, you
have a bunch of Illustrator files (sort of master files with all of the
information about all of your work, including undo info, layers, brushes
and whatever), then you export the designs to SVG. You are then going to
get some SVG files (probably highly optimised and utterly cryptic inside
if Illustrator does it's job properly) which you can publish online.

This is pretty similar to Flash in that it is viewable, but not
particularly easy to reverse engineer (assuming that lots of nasty
optimisation is done).

-- 
(o_   | Toby Jaffey : www.nott.ac.uk/~psystrj/
//\   | Real Programmers don't comment their code.  If it was hard to write, 
V_/_  | it should be hard to understand.

Received on Wednesday, 5 July 2000 19:38:41 UTC