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If you wrote the words you own the copyright
Saturday, December 19, 2009 by Dave Winer.
At Poynter Paul Bradshaw asks a question with an obvious answer. 
Paul Bradshaw: In the E-mail Era, Who Owns the Interview?
Obviously the person who wrote the words owns the copyright. Fair use allows the reporter to quote them. I can't imagine a lawyer advising or a court deciding otherwise.
And of course this highlights the fact that a lot of people help reporters and news organizations, without any hope or expectation of compensation. It's funny that none of these people are mentioned in the sad pieces that wonder if the news industry has a future. And no one seems to see an even more interesting question -- in the age of blogs, do we still need reporters? (I think we do, but not as much as we used to.)
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Dave Winer, 54, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.
"The protoblogger." - NY Times.
"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.
One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.
"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.
"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.
"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.
Dave Winer
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.Last update: 12/19/2009; 11:37:34 PM Pacific. "It's even worse than it appears."
