Johannes Rau Quotes
Certainly the interest in asserting copyright is a justified one.
Rau, Johannes. "Address at the Centenary of GEMA." 100th Anniversary of GEMA, 22 May 2003, Berlin.
Getting agreement of different nations on copyright protection has always been a problem.
Guthrie was one of the many people who used the copyright law to prevent someone else from restricting the information and allowing wide utilization of their proprietary material. This is sometimes called “copyleft.” This quotation collection is another example of copyrighted material with broad encouragement of utilization.
In early America, the United States did NOT participate in the European International Copyright convention. The American purpose of copyright was not to protect authors and intellectual property owners, but to promote knowledge and culture. The original purpose was to limit the time during with an author could control his/her creative work so that the society as a whole can get maximum benefit. With the rise of large corporate intellectual property owners with strong lobbyists, they have been able to change the copyright law to greatly enlarge their time and methods of control. The Pirate Party wants to go back to the original intention of the Founding Fathers.
Note that the only reason given in the constitution for protecting intellectual property was to promote the progress of science and useful arts. Inventors, would keep secret their inventions and techniques of manufacture and use in order to protect their economic interests. No one else would be able to benefit by understanding the invention and taking it further and increasing knowledge and understanding. So the Founding Fathers told Congress to establish a system where inventors would get a guarantee of a reasonable time to profit exclusively from the invention in exchange for making the invention public. The plans, methods and drawings had to be made public and until the 20th century a model of an invention had to be supplied to the Patent Office. Anyone could get an inexpensive copy of any patent and come and study the models. Today, most people believe that the reason for a patent system is to protect the intellectual property of the inventor, but that was not a purpose or even a serious consideration. The reason however was educational and to demystify technology and produce more science and technology which it did.
Johannes Rau was a German politician (SPD). He was President of Germany from 1 July 1999 until 30 June 2004 and Minister President of North Rhine-Westphalia from 20 September 1978 to 9 June 1998. In the latter role, he also served as President of the Bundesrat in 1982/83 and in 1994/1995.
