Before You Begin Coding..You Should...?

In article <slrnfomhji.pfv.spamspam (AT) bowser (DOT) marioworld>,
Ben C <spamspam (AT) spam (DOT) eggs> wrote:

On 2008-01-14, dorayme <doraymeRidThis (AT) optusnet (DOT) com.au> wrote:

It simply did not occur to me that anyone would feel precious
about this particular pictorial joke. Any more than any verbal
joke. Jokes are bandied about and god help us all when one is
required by the moral brigade to always remember who first made a
joke or to respect it if someone gets all precious about it.

For something like that I might attribute it if I could remember whose
it was. Otherwise I might say "someone came up with this". Or nothing.
But I wouldn't actually pass it off as my own work.

A verbal joke on the other hand I would just re-use or adapt without
crediting it. Jokes just wouldn't be funny if you had to keep crediting
them to people. Professional comedians steal each others jokes all the
time. It's just the way it works.

Passing off someone's work as your own deliberately or slyly is
clearly bad. Naturally, we would feel pissed off if someone
simply lifted a publication that took us a lot of time and effort
to put together and went on to make money or get great credit
for. In the case of the pie chart in this thread, it never
occurred to me to have the slightest worth beyond a light joke
and I am still reeling from Gerard's revelation. I have lost my
balance and keep falling over!

The same goes largely for philosophical ideas as well. Some very
academic books try to credit everything all the time but it makes them
so turgid as to be practically unreadable. You also often find the
author is so hamstrung by angst about misattributing things that he's
unable to say much at all.

Ideas were always meant to be shared freely, that's how they develop.
Claiming credit or charging money for work you didn't do on the other
hand is obviously unfair, and that's what intellectual property laws are
there for.

There will always be grey areas where you need to get legal advice or
err on the side of caution (although saving a picture from the web and
putting it on your desktop is not one of them).

There is nothing here that I disagree with. I would urge everyone
to be less precious about their own stuff, be it ideas in
academia or material on the web. I think a lot of unproductive
time goes on in the mind worrying about who owns what would be
better used to simply develop ideas.

--
dorayme