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No, you need to get a clue. If I use it, I am bound by law - not just copyright law but the whole body of law, including contracts. If a court rules that the GPL is a contract of adhesion and that some of the terms are unenforceable, then those parts of the license are simply null and void. It's as if they never existed.

A license is a form of contract in many places. Even your driver's license is a contract.

Eban Moglen doesn't like that the rest of the world isn't the United States. Well, that's just too damned bad for him. Also, there is no proof that abandoning the GPL for an open license like MIT or BSD would harm free software - look at how much code Apple continues to kick back to the FreeBSD project.

I enjoy reading what the "Technollama" blog (written by Andres Guamuz) has to say. http://www.technollama.co.uk/

He seems like a level-headed, well-informed lecturer with insight into UK law as well as US laws.

Except he hasn't done anything wrong under UK law. The police and music industry already tried that in the OiNK case and lost their case [..]

Counter-argument: Because the UK prosecutors chose fraud laws instead of copyright laws, the case was never tested in court using the laws most likely to apply:

"The problem seems to have been that prosecutors chose to charge Mr Ellis with conspiracy to defraud, instead of anything related to copyright infringement. This meant that they had to prove Mr Ellis was trying to defraud his customers, when it was clear that he was offering a service, and his clientele knew fully well what they were getting into. No fraud then.

Why didn't the prosecution try for copyright infringement offences? For example, s107 CDPA establishes criminal offences for various copyright infringement acts made "in the course of business". As Mr Ellis was clearly profiting handsomely from his services, it could be argued strongly that he was infringing copyright for commercial gain. Or can it? The main problem with torrent sites is precisely that no infringing copies are kept on the servers, and that the trackers act simply as facilitators. Using a real-world analogy, torrent sites are more akin to bar lounges where illicit goods change hands. Nonetheless, s107 also covers secondary infringement offences, such as communicating infringing copies to the public, which one might think is precisely what a torrent site does. However, the wording of UK copyright law is problematic in this respect, as it seems entirely drafted with physical copyright infringement in mind."

A few illustrations of my point:

http://www.technollama.co.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/open_source_communism.jpg

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/07/31/ms_ballmer_linux_is_communism/

http://designora.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/communist-android.jpg

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NCirDFWL4Q4/TdPQtYogiSI/AAAAAAAAAVs/4bVHzsijPO0/s400/73194-1.png

Atoms aren't patentable. We know that machines are just a collection of atoms. Therefore, no machine should be patentable.

Except that a collection of atoms is not an atom in and of itself. When you combine mathematical results, you have yet another mathematical result.

There are several good arguments for why software patents do not achieve the goals that the patent system is supposed to have. "Software is just math" is not one of them.

Actually, it is a common criticism of software patents. Both the Church-Turing thesis and the Curry-Howard correspondence have been pointed to in debates about software patents, especially in cases where the patents cover nothing more than common algebraic, number theoretic, or statistical techniques where the variables have been given specific labels (i.e. the patent is on how you interpret a set of variables). See, for example, the criticism of the eHarmony patent:

http://www.technollama.co.uk/patenting-maths

In general, when there is such an obvious patent on math, it is criticized for being a patent on math. Yet anyone with an undergrad level education in the theory of computation knows that all software is math; it is just less obvious in most cases because of the abstractions we use, which are designed to make us think that we are building a machine of some sort.

Say I created my own streaming service, and started streaming my own homemade movies. I created an account for me to use, and then handed that password out to others, would I be infringing that law? I think it would be silly to restrict others from sharing their own creations. Reminds me of recent law in Portugal.

While Michael Geist states that they are and that the US is deliberately blocking exports

The response from the U.S. is important as well. It is delaying market access to sugar from the developing country until the copyright reforms are in place. Until that time, Costa Rican sugar producers will not be able to sell their product in the U.S.

a technollama article that Geist cited does not seem to have the same opinion. They were not able to confirm a connection between the issues and in fact found information to the contrary.

I was able to track down some more information about this other than the poorly-reference Tico Times article. La Nación reported that the problem was first highlighted by sugar cane exporters in Costa Rica earlier this week. The exporters complained that they have 11.880 metric tonnes of sugar in storage, which has already been sold to American importers, but that cannot be sent because of CAFTA restrictions. The American embassy is quoted in that same article as stating that this has nothing to do with CAFTA, and that it is simply a matter of the country having reached its allocated sugar export quotas. This seems like an accurate appraisal of the situations, as I was unable to find a single reference outside of the Tico Times stating that the United States had threatened Costa Rica at all. In fact, raw cane sugar quotas for 2010 were announced by the U.S. Trade Representative back in September 2009, and are "based on the countries' historical shipments to the United States".

For reference, the ticotimes.net article simply stated

Yet, until the final piece is approved, the United States is delaying market access to sugar. Costa Rican sugar producers will not be able to sell their product in the U.S. unless legislators approve the last part, known as the 14th amendment.

but as the technollama article indicates, no one else has said this and it could not be confirmed.