At 01:22 16-05-2000 -0800, Antoine Leca wrote:
>> But it would set an undesirable precedent.
>
>In fact, the precedent was the inclusion of copyright, TM etc.
Copyright and TM are legal symbols. Copyright in particular is an
international legal convention. Besides, both copyright and TM were part of
pre-existing encoding.
I am afraid we are going to repeat history here: We will include something,
open up the door to every company in the world wanting to be encoded. Then
we will close the door, and have endless discussions how something is in
Unicode for "historical reasons".
>Certainly (I like "agreement" above, because it conveys a meaning of
>exchange of common values). And as a legal term, it has same status
>as the Copyright sign (unless I am missing something).
No, it does not. Nothing in the Berne Convention ever states so.
>More to the point, Copyright is a law of the United States of America,
>that have nothing to do with my own law.
Huh? The US is a relative late-comer. Copyright is an international
convention. Certainly in my home country (the late Czechoslovakia),
Copyright protection existed for the life of the author plus 50 years long
before the US authors enjoyed the same life-long protection.
> However, I am including it,
>and using this character, just because this is almost requested by
>the US law to (somewhat) prevent piracy. I fail to see the difference
>with Copyleft here (except that the field of the second is narrower).
The difference is the copyright is an international convention, while
copyleft is a marketing gimmick of a specific company which gives away free
software so it can make money be selling manuals and other kinds of
"support." If we allow copyleft, we will have to allow everything any
clever marketer ever comes up with in the future.
>The summum is reached by TM.
It was part of a pre-existing encoding (ISO 8859-1). And it is not a symbol
created by an individual company.
>Remember that Microsoft already mandates me (by contract) to use TM
>or (R) after every one of the occurence of Microsoft, Windows, NT etc.
But that has nothing to do with Microsoft. They did not create the symbols.
We do not have the Windows symbol in Unicode, do we?
>First, FSF is not perceived as a company, at least here, but much more
>like a sect or a philosophical trend.
Which only goes to show you how successful a gimmick it was.
Adam
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