GNU GPL law and "lagom" copyright

Johannes writes "Newsforge column on "lagom" copyright. I think we need to discuss these issues more. Maybe a GNU GPL law isn't so bad after all. As Pawlo states: "Would not a modern democratic society benefit from a plurality of irreconcilable and incompatible doctrines? We need the GNU GPL, but we also need proprietary software, Open Source software, BSD licenses, the Apache license and so forth. That would make the case for GNU GPL legislation void. However, as Lawrence Lessig taught us in his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, the code may in itself work against plurality.""

Comments

GPL is defensive

[guerby]

RMS genius was to use the very same weapon that the big copyright conglomerates in order to protect something fundamental, the people right to take advantage of the information age to share freely more and more knowledge in particular in the form of source code in the software field.

The big commercial-only entities want people right to create and share destroyed since they want to control completely all creation. They buy legislation, but they don't have enough power to break the fundamentals of copyright law, hence they can't break the GPL. The only thing they can do is to spread FUD or confuse the issue.

That is the point missed by the article, the GPL is our protection against this trend, and it is temporary in the sense that when the law will state clearly that people have the unlimited right to understand, create and share information on any medium and so the big conglomerates are defeated, then the GPL and most existing more or less defensive licensing scheme are all irrelevant.

But in the meantime we're better off with GPL wherever it makes sense, and all form of GPL-bashing or trying to put bad words in the mouth of the FSF people are to be looked at with a critical eye.

Never forget that the BSD and most other license are very weak at protecting our collective work in the current environment. Under BSD, any company could take our code, slightly change a protocol, patent it and sue the original authors, and even without patent it could sue for frivolous legal reasons or prevent any further work on the original source base.

--
Laurent <guerby@acm.org>

a pointlessly divisive debate

[opus]

This is a pointlessly divisive debate. What difference does it make if RMS and Bradley Kuhn would support radical change in US copyright laws regarding software?

It's as silly as a heated debate over the future government of Mars.

Radical change in US copyright law regarding software has about as much chance of happening in the next 30 years as legalization of marijuana.

All we can do is fight for what few legal rights we do have (e.g. the right to reverse engineer), and work outside the political and legal system to create a world in which software copyrights don't matter, by writing and supporting Free Software.

Tim O'Reilly, ESR, RMS, and others: please stop the pointless squabbling.

Re:Not even close.

[evilviper]

There's this language called English... Although it could more accurately be called 'American'. It's the language I natively speak, although I also skeak German better than some native Germans I know well.

I've known Japanes, Chinese, Koreans, Russians, Saudi Arabians, Pakistanis, Indians, Germans, and others I just cant think of off the top of my head... Every last one of them (hundreds mind you) told me in no uncertain terms that English was far simplier to learn than their native languages, and that English is the most verbally rich language they knew.

To the point... Moderate is the correct word in the context that I saw it used. If you provide it in many different contexts then I will easially be able to give you a much more approproiate term.

I agree that the English language has incorporated terms and words from many different languages, but that just shows my point. If an equivalent term did not exist in the English language, it would have become a mainstream word long before any of us were born. Sweedish people have been imigrating to America for hundreds of years, yet a small group of you people believe you know something that nobody before you has ever thought of.

The odds are in favor of you not knowing english well enough to know that there is an English equivalent. The alternative being that you know something that thousands of Sweedish Americans before you did not consider.