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

Re:GPL is defensive

[guerby]

how do you patent prior art?

Well in the pure patent prior art case, you just pay a lawyer to patent it, corrupt your friendly patent office to accept it, then threaten the author who obviously won't fight since it will cost him/her a lot of money and time (and may be jail time). This is currently at work, and it works quite well for the big conglomerates against the people (anything comes to mind?).

Second case, you change one comma somewhere and you patent your change, since you spent money paying someone to change the comma, you're innovating right? So you can patent, otherwise who would invent anything for the poor of us? If the thing is a protocol, you pay an ad campaign, get people to use your modified and patented protocol (or protected by whatever law bought by the big conglomerates, I assume I don't need to mention lawS I'm talking about here) then when the original author tries to update the original code base to interoperate with the bastardized version, you sue him/her crying that you want government to protect your right to make a buck, woooo the big evil pirates, GPL kills innovation, FSF people are bad = communist = terrorists = anti american etc... (need I point to any recent news?).

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Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>