Warp  wrote in message <487e8a2f@news.povray.org>:
>   He is the author of the software. He *owns* the software.

That is a common misconception. Holding a copyright has nothing to do with
owning. The copyright lobbies try to have us believe the opposite, using the
misleading expression "intellectual property", because we have been taught
for centuries that property is something sacred, but they have very few in
common, either legally or philosophically.

Let me quote Thomas Jefferson, who explained it much better than I could
ever do:

# It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors
# have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for
# their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot
# question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature
# at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right
# to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the
# subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an
# acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether
# fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property
# for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the
# occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of
# social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be
# curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain,
# could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If
# nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive
# property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an
# individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but
# the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every
# one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar
# character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other
# possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives
# instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at
# mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread
# from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of
# man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and
# benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible
# over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the
# air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of
# confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature,
# be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits
# arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may
# produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and
# convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.
# Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until
# we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave
# a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is
# sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but,
# generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce
# more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that
# the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England
# in new and useful devices.
# 
# Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right,
# but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line
# between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an
# exclusive patent, and those which are not. As a member of the patent board
# for several years, while the law authorized a board to grant or refuse
# patents, I saw with what slow progress a system of general rules could be
# matured.

(Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 13 August 1813)

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