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You Can't Oppose Copyright and Support Open Source
Reader gbulmash sends us to his essay on the fallacy of those who would abolish copyright. The argument is that without copyright granting an author the right to set licensing terms for his/her work, the GPL could not be enforced. The essay concludes that if you support the GPL or any open source license (other than public domain), your fight should be not about how to abolish copyright, but how to reform copyright.
...it would be possible to have commented disassemblies of everything that a computer can run openly available. That would be a lot better than the situation we have right now in SOME cases (by far not all of course - but please note you could still publish sourcecode in a more high-level language if you felt like it ;)) when there are only legally encumbered BLOBs available for crucial components of a system like, for example, graphics or network drivers, which you may execute, but not touch in any other way (in the US at least, that is).
Summa summarum, I think it's better to live in a world with copyright in place.
I just - like many other fellow advocates of Free Software - would wish for more people to publish their works under more permissive and freedom-granting licenses: to have art, culture, knowledge and wisdom spread for the greater good, and not just immediate, monetary profit in the first place.
Bottom line is: supporting Free Software and/or the GNU GPL does not automagically make you speak out against copyright per se at all.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
Who are these amazing people that want to abolish copyright?
Funny, I've never heard anyone say BSD wasn't open source.
The dangers of linking to someone taking a mental dump in their blog.
The author in question cites an ethereal 'anti-copyright crowd' and proposes that this 'crowd' are those who would license their software under the GNU/GPL.
I don't think I really need to point out that the reality is very different.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
As different priorities - the immediate priority is the propagation of open source, Creative Commons, and similar "free" copyright mechanisms. But these mechanisms are really just a means to an end, an attempt to use copyright against itself, and so it is perfectly consistent to still support a long-term goal of the ultimate overthrow of all existing copyright legislation and the adoption of a general system of intellectual freedom. Simple enough to me...
And I've been modded down by some shifty Microsoft lovers that lurk here on this peaceful website. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE..
Anyway, the GPL is like a Judo move. It rests on the strength of copyright law. If you make copyright stronger, then you make the GPL stronger. It's like a Judo master using his opponent's strength against him.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
"How can I get people to read my blog... I know, I'll pick an extreme opinion that few people actually hold, combine it with a more popular but unrelated opinion, and write a long argument to shoot the whole thing down as self-contradictory."
Yes, mod me down -1 cynical.
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
It's a fundamentally good idea; people who create something have exclusive rights to sell it. Where things go wrong is when people decide to meddle with it, like continuously extending the period that it applies. Something like a 5 year limit would be appropriate in today's fast paced world. Just think; who here wants to buy a DVD or CD that is over 5 years old? Not unless it was originally issued in some other format, right? Don't confuse copyright with the fallacy of "intellectual property". Intellectual Property is a collection of laws (copyright, patents, trademarks, etc.) which should never be grouped together, because each is different and for a different purpose.
In a society without copyright, what is the incentive to hoard away your source code apart form just being greedy and not wanting to share?
Free software, free thought, free society.
Wow, I've never seen a blog post described as an "essay" before. If only my old university markers were as generous as Slashdot editors!
I don't even want to get started on the content of this so-called essay, let's just say that I thought there were some holes in it; but considering content or not, this was one of the worst "essays" I've ever read. I doubt it will become the victim of copyright infringement...
We only need GPL because of copyright. When it's all gone, all will be well. Trust me on this one. The only thing to be concerned about is plagiarism. Everything else is fluff. No matter who "takes" the code, they can't stop you from using it also. And without copyright restrictions you are free to build on the works of others and everybody will be given the opportunity to do just that. There is so much superior tech(Alpha chip!) being locked down and kept off the streets because of copyright. This must end now. Jeeze, this is so redundant. I've said this so many times, and many others have also, with much more eloquence than I can muster with my seventh grade writing skills.
What?
Copyright is fine as long as it doesn't go to idiotic extremities such as DMCA, causing obscure censoring like that recently on Digg or Wikipedia. Everything's good in moderation.
His argument is putting up a straw man that doesn't really represent what RMS and FSF think, and then knocking it down.
The FSF stance is that good software comes with source code and with a particular set of rights which should be yours regardless of whether copyright can be used to enforce those rights or not. Perhaps it would be some other sort of law, or perhaps an ethical norm.
But IMO it would make about 100 times more sense to argue about software patents at the moment, because they are by far the worse evil.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
That's the whole point of the GPL. It's there to simulate the "no copyright" world within the existing copyright system. Go read some Stallman.
I'm not a big fan of the GPL, but I don't think public domain or a BSD-type deal is going to work either. But for everything I've ever read from Stallman and friends, I don't really think they have it down, either. It's as if they are sitting there hoping something will happen that will validate their position and everything will be kumbaya and honky dory. What that is they have no idea.
Stallman can rewrite his license until the cows come home, but without some real change in the legal area it won't really make much difference. And piling restrictions up on top of the GPL can only go so far. Not his fault - that's just reality.
And that's just for software... wait 'til you get into music and images and whatnot. The Creative Commons are in the same bind.
Three rights make a left. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly.
With regards to open-source, what is an appropriate length of term of copyright?
Is it really necessary to enforce copyright on source code for seventy-plus years?
What would be the shortest term of copyright that still allowed open source to flourish?
For the purpose of software only, what about limiting copyright for a period of no more than seven years? Allow a company to milk the product for all it is worth, then allow the intellectual property to be public domain. Maybe seven years is too short. Perhaps ten years is better.
How many of us use Windows 98 anymore still? How many think it should become public domain next year?
Because of that, pure binary data that has no meaning for a human being should have no copyright protection, only creations that a human can understand. No copyrights for binary executable files or data that has been copy protected or encrypted in any form, only for source code or data such as video or music that is published in a format that is open and unencumbered by any form of copy protection or secrecy.
Otherwise, how can the creation ever come into the public domain? How will one be able to read those DVDs when (and if!!!) their copyright ever expires? What's the point of granting a copyright for something that has never been published, such as the source code of commercial software?
If you use copy protection in any form, either by encryption or by a trade secret, then you are able to protect your own intellectual property, you don't need the protection that the state grants you in the form of patents and copyrights.
...or some such short time, GPL would not be needed (to 0th approximation) because nobody could take away your right to copy or use software. GPL is needed in places because people had been adding trivial mods to software and restricting access to it. If there were no access restriction in law, GPL would not have become desirable.
Remember that in the ancient world there was no copyright. However the practice of stealing someone's ideas without attribution was frowned on, regarded as a dishonest practice. (Plato was accused of this by the Pythagoreans (who saw the Timaeus as a bollixed and partial theft of this sort) but the punishment tended to be in the marketplace. Copyright is not needed in order to have creative output. It was enacted in order to encourage publication of items that might otherwise have remained trade secrets. (Patents were for the same purpose.)
Bottom line is you can oppose copyright and support GPL with complete consistency. If copyright did not exist (and some other abuses) GPL would not be necessary.
the only reason that gpl and other open source copyrights are required is to ensure that the openess doesn't get exploited, and keeps other people from attempting to revers its status as public domain, the only real reason that they are actually needed is in order to protect their work from copyright not in anyway supporting it
It seems to me that everything is about finding a balance...
Analogously, Slashdot could be seen as being a little like a website for other cultural groups using the tag line - "New
The FSF and OSS movements were NEVER about abolishing copyright. They were about abolishing vendor-lockin and proprietary messes [re: file formats for instance].
GPL was always a copyright license, in fact, ALL licenses are copyright driven. The only terms which are not is the public domain which cannot, by definition, have a copyright applied to it.
Anyone who thinks OSS is about abolishing copyright doesn't know what they are talking about.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
This is kind of like saying that if you are against socialism you should be against unions, or if you are for the death penalties for murder you should be for it for assault as well.
Just because you support the GPL as a good fix in the current climate does not mean you approve of the current climate. BSD fails for many projects because a company will walk in, grab the code, edit it a little to add proprietary components, sell it and hurt the development of the free project. See wine.
While the GPL isn't ideal, it defeats the "I am going to take your code, make a small change and call it mine" that wouldn't exist if no copyright existed in the first place. If copyright didn't exist, decompiling and DRM cracks would quickly negate any attempts to restrict use of code/programs.
Take music for example. Some guy makes a background track under the GPL; people use it in their GPL songs or pay (for the development of more free background tracks) to use it in non-free songs. Then take one who puts it under something BSD-ish. The RIAA comes in, sticks Brittney Spears on top of it, makes millions of $$$ and goes around suing people that didn't pay them for what they only edited.
Not to say that's likely, but it's a good example. If all open projects used the BSD, it's more likely than not MS/Apple would have just taken the best, stuck it in a proprietary package and sold it, making it so open projects could never get ahead or even catch up. Hell Apple already did this, with BSD itself none the less. How many times do people on slashdot alone say that they used to use Linux/BSD until OS X came around that had all the best of open software, except the fact that it was truly open?
So far as I care, the only reason I use the GPL and not BSD is because I don't want someone else having a full copyright on something using what I created. That's not why I created it.
Great Intellect...
Pretty please? I'm sorry but a blog rant is not news.
/MLS
is that I can't buy a certain book published in 1900, because nobody's printing it anymore. But I can't legally copy it from the library or download it from Google books, because the author died in 1956, and therefore it won't fall into the public domain before 2026. That's the problem with copyright, not its existence.
It is a well known fact that the abolition of copyright is one of the most important steps that could be taken to better the lives of people everywhere. The millions of lives ruined by the scheming of the RIAA and MPAA should be evidence enough of that fact.
In this day and age of digital reproduction, giving anyone a monopoly on the reproduction and distribution of creative works is tantamount to denying the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to any but a handful of wealthy corporations. Humans naturally share and seek out information, and the stranglehold of the RIAA, MPAA and others have on vital resources of the mind is unacceptable.
Copyright is theft. If the freeing of humankind from the shackles of copyright will involve the elimination of that quaint twentieth-century artifact, "open source", then that is a small price to be paid.
Let me paraphrase that:
That is the most emphatic form of the argument against you. Remember, all ideas are based on previous ones, from Shakespeare's plots to sort algorithms to Apple's look-and-feel. ("There are only seven plots.") And the right you describe here is not something to be defended, but something that must be positively enacted and enforced by the state. As phrased, however, you do have the right to decide whether to make something freely available: don't distribute it in the first place.
I am not necessarily taking the stance that copyright should be abolished. It's a very complicated question. The world would be a very different place without copyright, and I'm not smart enough to say whether that world would be better (I have my doubts). I do feel safe in predicting that the transition would be painful and quite likely violent - and it's simply not going to happen. So the question is entirely hypothetical. But I don't think what you describe is "perfectly logical" in the least.
I've kept up with this issue for years, and I can't think of anyone who wants to abolish copyright outright.
Ensure Fair Use? Sure.
Restrict copyright to a reasonable 20 or 30 years (even though 5 years would probably be sufficient for most purposes)? Sure.
Abolish it entirely? Well, it probably wouldn't hurt as much as some people think it would, but it wouldn't be especially useful either, as long as Fair Use is allowed and it expires after a reasonable 20 or 30 years.
The article claims you can either support both copyright law freedoms and GPL provided freedoms, or support neither. This is incorrect and many GPL advocates such as RMS do not like all of the freedoms that copyright law affords its users. For example, RMS claims on his site that the author's freedom to prevent others from sharing the author's work is unethical.
If you're a libertarian, you can't be for government reform.
If you're a green-peace activist, you can't drive to rallys.
If you're a vegetarian, you can't eat yogurt.
Now to be fair, the article has points that aren't drowned in sensationalism. Like, for example, how non-copyrighted works could be taken away and used by corporations. Which, in a copyright-free environment, would be perfectly OK.
The opening "joke" is key to understanding the logic. Either you'd sleep with someone for money OR you wouldn't, price is irrelevant to whether you're a whore or not. Similarly, either you'd never use copyright for anything OR you would, context be damned. So Open Source advocates who see OS as the only way to make something work under the current system are tarred with the same impractical black-and-white brush as a woman who would sleep with someone for enough money to guarantee a college education and financial security for her children.
Utter lack of taste or tact aside, this is just one philosopher shouting that a different philosopher should change their symbols, with no grounding in utility or practicality.
The ______ Agenda
The GPL is in place because without it, somebody would take some open source code, make a derivative work of it, copyright the derivative work, and charging for it or place other tight restrictions of it. For example, look what Apple did with BSD.
Without copyright, somebody could make and distribute derivative works of open source code, but they wouldn't be able to copyright the derivative work or impose restrictions on its distribution or modification.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
Firstly, really now, how many people here have advocated or even simply personally believe that copyright should be abolished? How many people that you know do?
Straw man FTW!
Secondly, the writer suffers from a classic confusion of ideologies: GPL == Open Source.
Bzzzt! Sorry, try again next week.
Abolishing copyright would not be some terrible bane to Open Source. While there are any of dozens of copyright licenses in use by open source, the common theme is, share the source code. Removing copyright does remove the licensing requirement to do so, it would change little. Those who would share. Those who would not, still would not. Open source would not falter for that change.
Free* Software, on the other hand, would suffer the loss of it's pride and joy, the GPL. But then, to hear a FS advocate call for the abolishment of copyright is an even more absurd straw man.
* Free as in software freedom, not human freedom. Because software wants to be free... right?
at least in my opinion. Remember, my opinion is worth what you paid for it.
/. would have much of a problem. This truly is a case of the people speaking with one mind, even if there are people who can't figure out what is being said.
Nobody is against copyright per se. What people are against is how copyright is used to damage the principle for which it was founded. Artists should have copyright to their work. Distribution companies should not. If you write some really nifty software you should have copyrights to it, not a patent unless it seems to revolutionize the software industry or some part of it.
What people (/. in general) are against is using that copyright authority to run roughshod over the public with it. Nobody really wants musicians to give their art away for free. What we see today is a backlash on the business model of the RIAA and their member companies. I don't think that there are many people that aren't willing to pay a modest/reasonable price for a CD. They do however want to be able to use that CD and its content where ever they want to, including loaning it to a friend, reselling it, or making backup copies so they don't have to purchase it multiple times. These issues have nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with how the **AA (and consequently the government) abuse copyright law to line their own pockets.
The people who write OSS software deserve the copyrights to that, and I often contribute to those projects that I feel I use and enjoy. Hell, I even once bought a copy of winzip. As far as patents go, even the USPTO/courts are starting to realize that the patent situation is totally out of control, and harming business interests as well as damaging the public good that it was meant to foster. Notice that recent rulings may invalidate the patents that Verizon holds that were used to nearly drive Vonage out of business. That is exactly the opposite of what they were meant to do.
To say that the F/OSS community in general doesn't like copyright or patents is absurd. What they don't like (and I'm taking liberties in speaking for them) is how they are used to drive unjust revenues at the expense of the public and the original content producers. iTMS is evidence that people will pay for content if it is usable, though I have some questions about how ultimately useful iTunes DRM'ed music actually is.
If patents and copyrights were applied in a logical and fair manner, producing the productivity and benefits they are supposed to, nobody on
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
The point that the author is missing is that the GPL is not written by people who have any love for copyright - far from it - this is why they call it copyleft. One of the ideals behind open source is that knowledge is not a private possession, but a public possession. The GPL is a very elegant way of achieving this goal inside current copyright law.
Sure, it would be a great achievement to abolish copyright on knowledge ( intellectual copyright ) completely. But in the current climate, that's not going to fly. Therefore I think it's completely consistent to be anti-copyright and pro-GPL. The only inconsistency is in people's minds who can't appreciate what the GPL is trying to achieve.
However there are other forms of open source software too, many of which do not rely on copyright in any shape or form.
Ultimately, open source software is a philosophy and changing the legal tools will not change too much. The GPL is also just a tool and even if the GPL was to be ruled invalid (or was invalidated by the removal of copyright laws) not much would change. When the Shroud of Turin was shown to be fake the nuns didn't commit mass suicide; similarly open source software will continue, with or without copyright, GPL or whatever icons.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I'm surprised this argument is still around considering how many times it's been shot down in flames. It looks like the author has no idea how politics works.
A person who aims at an extreme will first support more moderate positions that have a greater chance of being accepted. Imagine that there is a nation that contains monarchists, republicans, and anarchists. If the monarchists are in power, the republicans and the anarchists will likely ally to bring them down. If a state of anarchy exists, the republicans and the monarchists will likely work together.
Right now, copyright law is incredibly strong, so people who want to completely abolish it are supporting the people who want to reform it. Of course, it's not black and white, there are different groups who want to reform it in different ways, but this is a rough description of what's happening.
When copyright abolitionists seem to be righteously indignant about GPL violations, what they're doing is trying to protect a valuable weapon from being damaged or rendered irrelevant. A similar principle exists for people who support strong copyright law. They don't (normally) genuinely think they hold the moral high ground against the other two; it's just another weapon that they want kept sharp so that they can protect their interests.
While the GPL isn't ideal, it defeats the "I am going to take your code, make a small change and call it mine"
Nope. Only a willingness to go to court will 'stop' what you seek to stop. See Virgin and the Virgin Web thingie as an example of violation, and an unwillingness to go to court.
Hopefully for all your talk, you are willing to go to court when needed.
As everybody has already commented, this article is based on fundamentally flawed logic on so many levels that it is difficult to enumerate, so I'll stick to some important points.- for-a copyright law getting abolished. So you see, I actually support and not support the same thing at the same time, and I have not disappeared in a puff of logic.
1) You can oppose copyright and support open-source at the same time. In fact, if you do oppose copyright, you're only viable strategy IS to support open-source, while copyright is THE LAW and stuff.
2) You can also support a concept while knowing that it is unimplementable. You can find several examples in History books.
3) "members of the anti-copyright crowd cite the GPL (GNU Public License) as an alternative to copyright" is not an example of irony but of a practical stop-gap solution.
4) The "look at what happens if the GPL is unenforceable." is a bizarre glimpse into a strange world that conveniently ignores a bunch of nasty truths, all in all pretty well debunked on other comments, although I find it most revealing that the "world without GPL", does have DRM! The "dreamworld" turns out to be more like a "strawworld" .
My personal opinion is that copyright has a place, and therefore should not be abolished, in a *perfect world*. However, due to the fact that the world is what it is, I would be perfectly happy with that bloated-and-abused-out-of-proportion-sorry-excuse
*puff*
Copyright isn't a problem. For the most part it works as intended. The screwed up patent system is by far the most problematic member of the IP triumverate (copyright, patents, and trademarks). The only problems crop up when copyright is misapplied to support monopolistic practices like the production of proprietary printer cartridges.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
"Who are these amazing people that want to abolish copyright?"
Apparently those who don't suffer from "short memory" disorder.
Who opposes copyright?
Most of the controversy is about extending the term of it to ridiculous lengths ... I mean it is possible with a little more extension for the copyright to go out to 200 years.
Bitter and proud of it.
Most people aren't trying to desperately abolish copyright. Copyright as it stands must be removed and replaced with, say, the original intent for copyright, which is a reasonably short (20 years?) monopoly on an intellectual property to allow and encourage people to think up new ideas, and be assured of a degree of income from that.
Copyright should never persist beyond 20 years since date of copyright, even if the creator dies during this period (for the purpose of the estate of the copyright holder, I am thinking of the children after all).
Just think of everything that has been devised 20 years ago and earlier. A lot of rich content could be in the public domain. Imagine the innovation that could take place with people creating derivative works!
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Few people want to do away with copyright, what we want is more reasonable time periods and restrictions for copyrighted works. When Disney can continue to lobby to keep Mickey in the private domain, that does not encourage innovation - no matter what you say. We are in a state of perpetual copyright right now. Congress was instructed to PROMOTE PROGRESS in the arts, not provide the best commercial return for the arts.
It's about reasonableness. Times are changing, 18th and 19th century copyright regimes are not conducive to today's world. Do we need to do away with it all together? Of course not. But we also shouldn't be increasing time periods, increasing restrictions and reducing the availability of fair use.
Without copyright there is no need to enforce the GPL...it would be the truest form of open source. I'm not particularly for this approach and I don't be the whole "information wants to be free" argument but the essay is stupid and short-sighted.
Copyright is fine as long as it doesn't go to idiotic extremities such as DMCA
Agreed; the GPL would still work just dandy if you cut current copyright terms by a factor of ten.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
As many other commenters correctly pointed out, most supporters of either Free or Open Source software don't oppose copyrights. Some, specially in the Free camp, defend reforming them, but not abolishing. There is, yes, a small group that seriously opposes copyright; yours truly included. But it's a tiny minority, which means, even if the article was right -- which is a far cry from reality -- it would be hardly interesting.
And then, he misses the main point: to us copyright-opposers, copylefts are a way to subvert copyrights. It's elegant and useful to use something you oppose in favour of your cause. A copyleft license uses the (IMO broken) legal structure of copyright to enforce a "contract" that stands for almost the opposite values of copyright. That's a work of beauty.
Yes, if copyright was suddenly abolished, all my copylefts would become void. No duh. They would also become unnecessary, because the status quo would then be exactly what I wanted it to be.
What a false argument
Copyright does exist for a reason. The original intent is to allow the creators of easily duplicated content. It allows those who create such content to receive the benefit of that content.
However, the laws concerning this did not keep up with progress, and the intent was corrupted. Now if your an aspiring author, you basically have to take the sh*t sandwich that a publisher wants to hand you and eat it and smile. And if your works do hit the jackpot, your publisher gets the benefit and you basically do not.
There has to be some way to make things reasonable. To render the cost of content for consumers cheaper without leaving the creators with nothing. To make it so that if someone creates the best movie ever that they get the recognition they deserve, but also to make it so that once that movie is 50 years old that they cannot collect quite so much money on it as they once did.
Copyright should be a tool that will allow our most creative individuals to advance the state of human civilization. It should not be a club that greedy content owners use to beat consumers over the head and take their money.
END COMMUNICATION
Looks like another college sophomore just discovered the GPL.
r eedom.html
Welcome, sir. To start, why don't you Read the Fine Manual?
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
The FSF is an organization committed to the advancement of Free Software. The FSF contends that proprietary (non-Free) software development and distribution is unethical and should cease because it fails to satisfy the 4 essential freedoms of software users.
Free software is software that satisfies the 4 essential freedoms of users of software. These freedoms are completely independent of Copyright's existence or non-existence. The definition of Free Software makes no mention of copyright.
Absent the voluntary or involuntary elimination of proprietary software, the Free Software Foundation generally encourages the use of Copyleft. You seem to be confused about the difference between Free Software and Copyleft. Free Software is software that satisfies the 4 essential freedoms of software users. Copyleft, on the other hand, is a licensing strategy employed wherin existing Copyright law is leveraged to further the proliferation of Free Software. There is much non-Copylefted Free Software.
You also seem to confuse Open Source with Free Software or Copyleft. These are all quite different things.
Once again, I refer you to the Fine manual:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-f
Having said all this, please consider taking a few minutes to inform yourself in the future before making wild generalizations about people and organizations you know nothing about. And congrats on completing sophomore year!
Regardless whether you agree with copyright or not, the argument that copyright is good because without it there wouldn't be a GPL is simply wrong. The GPL was born to fight closed source. Closed source was protected by copyright. RMS et al had the great idea of using the copyright law to fight its effect, they used the law-guaranteed restrictive power of copyright to guarantee that the right of copying a GPL-ed work can not be limited.
If there was no copyright there would not be a need for the GPL because there would not be a restriction on copying, modifying and redistributing the source. The GPL is a counter-measure and as such its existence is dependent on that of the measure it counters. If you agree with a counter-measure it is a logical fallacy to say that the original measure is good because without it we couldn't fight against it...
The article goes into scenarios where Big Bad Megacorp steals your code and distributes DRM protected binaries because there's no copyright. Well, first of all the 'R' in DRM would not be there if there was no copyright. They had no legal basis of using any measure to stop you to copy the program. They can use technical measures, but if you defeat them, they're out of luck.
The Big Bad Megacorp would need a different business model to rip you off. I bet they'd find a way. It wouldn't be based on their exclusive right to copy a work, that's all. The current content provider industry business model uses copyright as the basis of their revenue. They would sink and some other industry would pop up that uses some other aspect to make money. Of course the copyright lobby is scared about *their* income going down and it's no consolation for them that some other businesses would became filthy rich if copyright was abolished, so they fight to protect and extend copyright as much as possible.
The GPL fights back at least in the software segment of the copyright business. But the GPL is only good because it undoes the restrictions that the copyright places on you (by ingeniously using the very law that protects the copyright industry's content) to provide you the freedom the industry wants to deny. Without copyright there wouldn't be GPL because there would not be a need for it.
It's a stupid law about abusing power and consumers.
I would support reasonable copyright, where stuff authored in my lifetime would be reproducible/remixable without royalty, author permissions, etc in my lifetime... 25 years is plenty, authors life + 150 years or whatever it is now is total BS, so I say either scale it back to something reasonable or abolish it.
And btw OSS only depends on copyright law in so much as it is the most convent way to enforce a contract with everyone who handles the code.
> The argument is that without copyright granting an author the right to set licensing terms for his/her work, the GPL could not be enforced...
Well yes. If we abolished copyright, we wouldn't need to enforce gpl, as it's spirit would then be enshrined in the (lack of) copyright law. That's the point of abolishing copyright.
"You mean you can't enforce this copyright contract without copyright laws!? GASP!"
Comment of the year
how will this affect the law then?
Even more secretive than "you cannot touch it, reverse-engineer it, and if you ever see it you're NDA'd to hell"? :-)
I don't think you can be more protective of source code than they are today.
I don't hear quite so many people around here bitching about the "copyright" system as I do about the broken "patent" system. While in some ways the two are similar, they are different systems.
The GPL would be invalid, but it would also be unnecessary.
Without copyright, the incentive to create and control closed-source software will sharply drop. With this drop in incentive, the only edge closed-source developers currently have (financial resources to pay developers) will disappear, and it would become irrelevant.
Openness will become the norm simply because its a more efficient development model, once no money is to be made with closed-source software.
Closed-source will lose by default.
I think we can all agree that getting rid of copyright is not an option, and that continuing with copyright the way it is would be just a wrong. I say do not let companies hold copyrights, only individuals hold copyrights. If an individual creates something at a company then that company gets a certain amount of that revenue from the copyright as long as that person is employed there. When the person is let go the company lets go of rights to that copyright income. Many details of such a system would need to be worked out but putting copyright back in individuals hands and limiting the time and range of copyright would do a lot to job security and spurring innovation. Of course there is no perfect system, and anything one comes up will someone will find a way to abuse it, but that's not a reason to stop trying. When I learned the basics of copyright it was to protect individuals from being taken advantage of by big business. So you invented spiderman comic, and sell a limited number of spiderman comics, a big business comes in and has more resources and steals your idea and floods the market with spiderman products without paying you for your idea, thus the market is flooded with the other items (that may be inferior) but no one can find your product in the vast sea. I just think that a company holding a copyright is a bad idea.
Can I take the place to mention that those four things are very different things? I certainly oppose to the three former, not the later...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
except that in a world without copyright, who needs the GPL?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
...and they show up whenever the discussion of copyright comes up on Slashdot. But abolitionists who also want to keep the GPL? Never met one. I suspect the blog entry is a big ol' straw man.
I think that many people who hope for a copyright-free future have an idealized vision that does not adequately take into account the fact that people will still have profit motives, and will be competitive. The immedate benefits are easy to understand... free music and movies for everybody! But over the long term, economic strength would seep away from those countries which are good at creation and innovation, and toward those countries which are good at copying and producing hard goods. In the short term, US citizens would no longer be required to pay whatever price Disney sets for a Mickey Mouse t-shirt; we'd have our choice from all the Chinese factories which can turn out t-shirts really cheap... and if we don't want all that money going to China's economy, then we'd just have to pay our own workers less. This is, of course, the free and open competition that I think copyright abolitionists want; it's better for the consumer. But, not so hot for nations like the USA with healthy post-industrial economies.
Neal Stephenson nailed it; six paragraphs in to Snow Crash, he writes that there are only four things that the USA does better than anybody else (everybody say it with me): music, movies, software, and high-speed pizza delivery. This is exactly why we're using the WTO to lean on China and Russia to have more respect for our output. When copyright is abolished and these economies wither away, it will be a bumpy ride for the USA. Enjoy your pizza.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
You seem to be of the opinion that if copyright was "nullified" you would magically get source code, that isn't the case.
The GPL's obligation to distribute source goes much further than simply nullifying copyright. If copyright were merely nullified then I could take some code, use it to make some binaries and then distribute the binaries, keeping my source changes to myself. As the other guy said that would be similar to the BSD.
The GPL ensures:
1) You have the legal right to make modified works.
2) You have access to the source to you can, in practice, actually make such modifications.
3) You must give that source access to others for modified works you distribute.
A "nullified copyright" would only achieve item 1.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Since when did Slashdot support such ridiculously logical arguments?
I'm too use to the "M$ sux" level of reasoning I guess.
In the long run it would be a better world. Sure there would be some bumps along the way and some people would take advantage of things ( but that is happening now, so that is nothing new ), but overall it would be a good thing for everyone.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I am always skeptical when the author of an article submits his own article to Slashdot. This case is no different.
bash: rtfm: command not found
Actually, you can fairly reasonably support open source and oppose copyright - as while donating your work into the public domain is "purer" and closer to that goal, practical realities make open source licenses like the BSD/X11/MIT licenses more practical.
It makes little sense to support Free Software (in the GNU/FSF sense) and support the abolition of copyright, since as the essay author noted, Free Software depends on copyright to enforce the restrictions applied by the license.
It is most unfortunate that the article submitter and the essay writer confuse open source and free software while attempting to comment on others' confusion about aspects of them. That said, the confusion could well be a matter of wording, as there are no really gross misunderstandings there.
In any case - boring and well understood by anybody who's going to read and understand that essay.
If you created an environment in which secrecy/superiority did NOT give an advantage, but sharing and collaborating did, then those would become the dominant traits and we would be sitting here discussing how these were the "natural" way to be. In societies dominated by "trial-by-combat" ideologies and might-makes-right, you see neither secrecy nor collaboration, but you do get a most diverse selection of warlords, strongmen and hangers-on.
There are societies on Earth where they haven't even invented numbers and have no concept of counting beyond none-few-lots. Nor are those societies easily capable of learning numbers. It is not merely that they have never come across them, the entire part of the brain dealing with logic has developed to process other information instead. Yes, the brain really is that flexible in the way it develops. Virtually nothing is hard-coded in at birth. How we are, what we do - these are all programmed in as you grow. Don't like the program? Then teach something different to the next generation. They're not confined to the limitations of those who lived before.
Ok, so it is clear from all of that that I believe that we could easily(!) mould society in whatever image we feel like. Ok, maybe not easily, but we could do it. It is possible. What is "human" is ultimately defined by us, we are not limited by that definition. The next question would then be "SHOULD we develop a society without selfishness, secrecy, one-upmanship, etc?"
This is not a trivial question. We have no evidence, on the level of entire modern societies, that this would be socially stable. It would be doable, but what happens next? Has society evolved the selfish traits because of the demands of growth, or are the selfish traits vestigial remnants of a long-decayed, long-surpassed requirement? Is copyright closer to the brain of society or its appendix? This is important - you wouldn't want to lobotomize humanity, but if overeager Intellectual Property has become a serious case of appendicitis, then to not remove it could be lethal.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
...the anti-rain crowd cite the umbrella as an alternative to getting wet, without any sense of the ironic fact that umbrellas can't exist without rain. They're proposing a solution while simultaneously complaining about the weather. While using an umbrella is less restrictive than staying indoors, it must be held at the proper angle in order to offer any protection. It is a way to keep dry. But without rain, umbrellas would never be opened.
Despite what some on this thread might have you think, abolishing copyright really does make a lot of sense... I am not alone when I say that society would be better off today without it... see this essay: http://www.questioncopyright.org/node/1
Commie bastards that hate business and freedom!
This is kind of a moot point if you don't believe in intellectual property, which I don't. I see open source as a means to an end. I support it just the same because its open and free. That doesn't change the fact that I don't respect any copyright or any other intellectual property non-sense. Copyright licenses on open source software is just attempt to play the same game with someone else's rules and ball. Its the "can't beat 'em, join 'em" addage.
I think what's really going to be interesting some day is when we discover an alien culture that has already invented everything we've invented and patented it with the inter-galactic patent bureau. They will more then definitely have prior art on any concept. Then I think people will realize how pointless it is to own an "idea".
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
Here is my proposed reformation to copyright law:
It should not be called "copyright." It should be called "collectionright." If I create something and choose to retain my collectionrights, then only I can collect money (directly or indirectly) from the distribution of what I have created. If someone is giving it away for free, there is nothing I can do. But the moment he puts an ad banner on his web page (or what-have-you) he has violated my collectionright, and I can sue him.
Copyright as it stands now has some real problems of scope and enforcibility. There are also some very wrong-headed notions of the necessity of direct distribution monopolies in order to ensure incentives to create (redhat makes a bundle selling support for products that a client can turn around and distribute for free (centos, anyone?), musicians make much more money on live performances than they ever could hope to on CD sales, and so on). This reform solves these problems while still providing sufficient incentive to create.
Jiu Jitsu is a martial art where the practitioner yields to the force of his opponent and then uses it against him. The point of the GPL is to bring about the end of copyright by using copyright itself as leverage. This is not prostitution, it is legal Jiu Jitsu.
I support copyright and the GPL. I just do not support the ultra-extended terms for copyright, making works never accessible to the public within someone's LIFETIME. All it does is to hurt creativity and improvement upon original ideas that help accelerate art and society in general. So by those terms I would not be upset if a given software program becomes public domain after a term, by that time we'd be on to better things because via the GPL we are allowed to play and progress.
My 0.02
As the parent article points out. GPL is about restricting what people can do with software. ``Oh, but only the bad people that want to bad things'' is a Richard Stallman whine. Do you want it free? Then let it be free. That means without restrictions. Without the restrictions that I want. Without the restrictions that you want. Without the restriction that Richard Stallman has blessed.
Freedom is more free than restriction. How difficult is that?!?!
Freedom also works. When you make something free, someone will do something with it that you will not like. Others will do things that are great. Trust freedom. Let your software be free using Public Domain and don't buy into the bulsh*t mealy mouthedness that is the GPL.
As the parent article points out. GPL is about restricting what people can do with software.
Really? A large part of the GPL is restricting how <B>closed source</B> applications can use GPL'd content. Abolishing copyright law would mean that those restrictions are superfluous and so a large part of what the GPL restricts would no longer exist. While the other restrictions would also have to go, you don't have to be for the entire GPL to be for the GPL.
GPL would have no effect if there was no copyright. It would just become meaningless.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
That assumes that a lack of copyright implies that all is published. There are other ways to keep things from being publicly available. Trade Secret law exists because it Trade Secrets are a better way to go for many.
You can't disassemble the code that's running someone's service. If you can't get to at at all, it doesn't matter whether copyright exists.
GPL may be good and it may be bad. It is certainly restriction, but RMS et al pretend that it's about freedom. If you're restricting things to help MY freedom, I ask you to stop. Real freedom is far better than the Restriction Through Freedom nonsense. GPL is 1984, War Is Peace, etc.
And I do.
Nyaaah =p
For one thing, it talks about a group (copyright abolitionists) that I've never seen any members of. I've heard about people calling for the death of the patent system, and to a degree I agree with that idea, but I've never seen anyone I don't think who wanted to get rid of copyright law entirely.
Although other than in maybe one case, I've never seen any real merit in the GPL myself, either. Yes, yes, I know I'm going to get a horde of the usual Stallmanite morons responding to this; go back to sleep, guys...I don't care. The main reason is that in my mind, your opinion is founded on a) primarily fear, usually of Microsoft, and b) brainwashing, rather than on any real logic whatsoever. I think that is the reason why I don't actually try and argue with Stallman's zealots any more for the most part...mind control isn't something that *can* be argued with logically. Every single time I see any of them post it proves that point, as well...the message is always the same, and always based purely on fear, hate, and a desire to dominate others. It's a fantastic image for newcomers to Linux to be exposed to.
I still feel that non-copyleft licenses are the way to go, because they give you copyright (which *is* different to public domain in my mind) but nothing else. That is the proverbial gift culture; no strings, and no fear.
How important is "the anti-copyright crowd" that the blogger writes about? It certainly has nothing to do with the FSF. Far more enlightening than the blog post is anything RMS has ever written. On copyright, read one of RMS's best writings, "Misinterpreting Copyright":
y right.html , or
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-cop
as found in http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf , or
as printed in his book _Free Software, Free Society_
...support an author's right to dictate...
...we've established what kind of girl you are. Now we're just haggling over the price...
All the endless discussion about copyright on Slashdot seems to assume that there is some mythical god-like entity that is enforcing a law that rational men (very few Slashdaughters, you must admit) have agreed upon after rigorous debate.
Nonsense, what passes for law is actually a collection of barbarous opposing forces that care nothing about reason and justice. And that especially applies to the forces of law enforcement.
By perpetually extending the copyright period through bribery, the media corporations have stolen the public domain for all intellectual properties created in the 20th century and the present. This is the greatest crime against creative works ever committed. Until this crime has been restituted, we have no option but to take the position that there can be no copyright whatsoever. Copyright law is meant to be a balance between authors and the public domain. No public domain; no copyright. We don't want to take such an extreme position, but it was forced upon us. Extremism in defense of liberty in no vice - said Barry Goldwater.
If someone writes a program and it is stolen by some corporation, then in all likelyhood they will price it far beyond the reach of the intended audience. The reasonable thing to do would be to just copy it, krak it, and use it. Which most people do now anyway (outside the wealthy parts of the world). In the open-source version (downloadable from a website beyond the reach of the fore-mentioned corporation), the author would attach a text file documenting how the code was stolen.
This vicious sexist nonsense really leaves sick. A woman who would have sex with a man for a million dollars is not a prostitute. She is willing to have sex once for a huge windfall gain whose effect on her life and family will far outweigh any distasteful feelings that she may (or may not) have about the individual sex act. Besides there isn't a woman in the world who would let a man like this get away from her. You think Mrs. G lets Mr. G just jump into bed with a dozen beautiful $1000 an hour courtesans every time he goes off on a fact-finding tour for his foundation? No way, she goes with him. Million dollar boners find it hard to just walk away from the women that they've offered themselves to.
No. A prostitute is someone has sex everyday, for relatively small amounts of money, with normal men. It's a job. It's a really bad job.
Men should stop using this so-called joke as a metaphor for whatever point that their trying to make. No woman thinks that it's funny. And it doesn't make any sense to anyone who knows anything about the real-world experiences of sex workers. As a metaphore, it's meaningless. As a joke, it's stupid and offensive. Best not to use it.
I think because most people dont take the time to think they need to generalize. So OSS people and software pirates might be construed as the same or similar group because all everyone hears is free software not open software. and free means you are a pirate because what kind of person wouldnt want to sell the fruits of their labor! These people should rot...somewhere other than here. But yea, I feel that this view is still how people see OSS, which needs to change. No one believes that people do anything for the good of humanity anymore, that ALL people are after the almighty buck. Poor world, Currency 1, Humanity 0. And this is futbol we are playing so that 1/0 score means the game is almost over!
Balderdash!
I like copyright, too, but I'm not willing to be amazed at the people who don't. Copyright is a nice thing to have, and it feels like being given additional freedoms if you're the copyrighter, but it's really the government stepping in and saying "we like a particular business model, but it could never possibly exist without heavy government interference. So we will remove your right to take a document and make a copy of it if you didn't write it, and if you do make a copy of a document you didn't write, we reserve the right to put you in prison and take away all your other freedoms. That's how much we like like this business model."
That's a really big leap to take. I don't like legislating failed business models into continued existence. I don't like farm subsidies, I don't like corporate handouts, and I don't like arguments like "but that'll put the X dealers out of business." I like it a heck of a lot less when it involves removing freedoms and obvious liberties from other people "Wait, it's a CRIME to learn a tune and perform it without paying someone else?"
Copyright gets even scarier when you watch the pattern of its extensions, especially the retroactive ones. The point of copyright is to encourage new works, so when you see copyrights extended on existing works, that's scary. When you see stuff that's about to finally enter the private domain after decades and lifetimes past the death of its creator, that's scary. Do you know where copyright started and stayed for the longest time? 14 years.
You can't notice that we don't have the rights to put video of a senate session on our website and not be at least a little bit concerned about whether or not copyright's such a great idea anymore. I'd quote a relevant Robert Frost poem to you, but that'd be a crime.
The only thing I want is the copyright changed to:
1 - Remove the DRM protection clauses (this applies to the DMCA and the likes);
2 - Make it intransmissible so that copyrights cannot be sold (this allows authors to choose how they wish to be rewarded).
I Am Not a Number ! I Am a Free Man !! Who happens to be in a woman's body, which actually turns out to be a pretty good deal !!!
.. provided that you absolutely 100% believe that we live in a completely fair, just and equitable world.
It really just boils down to that.
If 'The System' appears to treat YOU unfairly, then why should you treat 'The System' with any level of respect in return ?
GNU / FOSS / GPL'ed software exists, because WE said it should, and WE made it happen - not because the law somehow approved of it.
no one wants to completely abolish copyright. We all want to reform it.
it is currently being abused and there are several statutes which misinterpret the constitution.
Copyright was never intended to secure revenues for corporate interests.
It specifically denies corporate entities from owning or profiting from copyrighted works.
They're using their grammar skills there.
The real purpose of copyright is to make sure an author, artist, or musician can make a living from his body of work. That is, if I write a book and it's well received, I can make enough money to survive. This, in turn, frees me up to write more books and society as a whole benefits. Over the course of a lifetime, I could write twenty or thirty books, maybe even more. This is good for me, and good for society.
Without copyright, this is impossible. People are selfish; they won't pay for something unless they have to. So as a simple matter of fair play, we need copyright to preserve an author's right to make a living. We do this because we VALUE authors, we WANT them to make a living. We WANT to encourage them to continue to produce their work. It is a social good.
Lately, my government has extended copyright to 75 years past the death of the author. That'll allow an author's children and grandchildren to enjoy the benefit of his work, which isn't a bad thing. I hope to have children myself one day; it would be nice to be able to hand them a set of copyrights and leave them well situated in life. It's MY WORK, I can do with it as I please. Under this scheme, I can leave my copyrights to my children and make sure they're taken care of when I'm gone. This is also a social good.
None of you should have any problem with this. If you're capable of producing your own work, you will benefit from it in the same way all other authors and artists will.
I suspect that those of you who are up in arms over "copyright" are those who are incapable of producing your own, original work. What you really want is access to the works of OTHERS.
Sorry, kids... As Heinlein said, "TANSTAAFL" (There ain't no such thing as a free lunch).
Get to work. Write your own stuff. Get your own copyrights.
God helps those who help themselves.
NO CARRIER
28 years plus a 28 year extension, and you actually have to file for a copyright and put copyright notices on the work.
If this law were still in place everything before 1951 would be in the public domain. Imagine a world where you could download
all your old 1930s and 40s films online. In the year 2016 if the 1909 copyright act were still in place, everyone could be trading tv series
from the 1950s.
The fact that most people dont realized between 1790 and 1976 only 1 extension had been granted from 14 to 28 years.
The question the copyright lawyers of 1976-2006 have to explain is how all these extensions encouraged the promotion of
arts and sciences. How does it encourage the creation of new works to grant extensions to estates and corporations?
Do you understand why Richard Stallman even started the GPL? He wrote a program, published the source code as public domain.
Another company took it out of the public domain and copyrighted it for themselves, and then told Richard that he was violating THEIR copyright.
This is the reasons of the restrictions in the GPL.
So tell me, has the public domain changed?
--jeffk++
ipv6 is my vpn
Not all open source projects are GPL, so you *could* support open source without supporting copyright.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I don't think you're right. Trade secrets do not need copyrights to survive. Employees are (generally) not legally permitted to divulge reasonable trade secrets many of wich are already not covered by copyrights etc. For example, you may generally not divulge details of unreleased products etc. Copyrights possibly do limit the further distribution of code once it has escaped the company, but the removal of copyright would slam down the gates harder. ie. Rather than publishg some of its code under copyright, a company would just no longer publish any of its code and would apply even more draconian measures to prevent ther boundaries from "leaking" (eg. no mor company email containing code etc).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
In a world without copyright (and without software patents), there is no longer a need for the GPL. After all, trade secret as you wish but any software can be disassembled and reverse engineered.
If you think current copyright law is not broken, considder:
Strange Drink v3.4
Copyright Suspect Foods INC 2007, All rights reserved.
Terms of consumption:
This drink is provided 'as is' and comes with no warranty or fitness for any particular purpose to the extent permissable by law. Suspect Foods INC accepts no responsibility for any adverse effects that may be caused by consuming this drink, including , but not limited to, eating, drinking or smelling the drink in question. The drink remains the property of Suspect Foods INC at all times, and this license can be revoked at any time. You do not have any righst to consume, redistribute or modify this drink other than as specifically permitted by this license...
Sure, abolishing copyright law may have undesireable effects, but as long as it remains in force the GPL is the next best thing.
If you visit the gnu.org philosophy pages, you find hatred of copyright from consist moral principles. The idea is that keeping people from copying things that are easy to copy is morally wrong:
When software owners tell us that helping our neighbors in a natural way is piracy, they pollute our society's civic spirit.
This is the original spirit of the GPL, which was used copyright laws to assure freedoms that some copyright owners want to abolish.
Not much has changed. The GPL has been extended to fight new menaces, like DRM and patents, which strip you of your freedoms even if you have free software, source code and all the requirements of GPL2. Despite this extension, the GPL would not be required if it were not for copyright laws. Without the DMCA, you could freely modify Tivo and make it your own again and there would be no problems. The proponents of copyright have made new abominable laws to deny your freedoms, this has not made the old abominable laws right or necessary.
If your intention is to assure users their freedom, you will use the GPL. That won't make you a friend of copyright, it will make you an advocate of freedom.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The GPL exists mainly to make sure that people who benefit from open source code can't then own their changes and deny others the benefits. If there was no copyright then there would be no legal way they could keep others from using their improvements (sure they could try to obfuscate them but the binary copy itself would be free so they would gain little from doing this)
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation devised, in addition to some marvelous software, the GNU General Public License (GPL for short). Or the CopyLeft it is sometimes called.
It is quite a revolutionary document, using the "copyright" tool to to protect your right to use free software.
Unfortunately using copyright to protect free software is a lot like using a Jackal to guard the hens.
In fact, various inconveniences relating to this have resulted in modifications such as the LGPL (Library General Public License) and more recently the NPL (Netscape Public License)
I call these matters mere inconveniences, the real damage will occur when the Jackal's, (sorry, I mean lawyers), actually get to test the GPL in court for the first time.
Thus enter my version.
Its very simple.
Entirely consistent.
Completely unrestrictive.
Easy to apply.
The "No problem Bugroff" license is as follows...
The answer to any and every question relating to the copyright, patents, legal issues of Bugroff licensed software is....
Sure, No problem. Don't worry, be happy. Now bugger off.
All portions of this license are important..
OK so the last part of the license sounds a bit harsh, but seriously folks, if you are a :-
You keep repeating this story to Slashdot, but I'm missing any credible reference to it. Perhaps you could provide a few more specifics besides the name RMS?
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't know whether your story is true or not. I've followed RMS's advocacy for free software and the GPL since the early 80s and debated Public Domain v. GPL in mailing lists / netnews a couple of times and he hasn't brought up any similar point.
Regardless of whether it is true, the story is more about documenting than copyrighting. What you describe is a bogus copyright claim that could be successfully defended with good documentation and without copyright.
but support the GPL/BSD/whatever as an interim solution?
http://watching-eyes.blogspot.com/
Consider, if you will, a bill that effectively places *all* software under GPL-like terms. This means that the author no longer has much in the way of control over his work. The very term "copyright," referring to who has the right to copy the work, is no longer applicable - everyone does. The article would have us believe that one of two things must be true. Either the above is simply "copyright reform" (which notion seems, to me, absurd), or no one who supports such a bill could support the GPL. The fact that the GPL uses present tools to accomplish it's work does not mean one has to support those tools if a better solution comes along. (as a side note, the above is not a position I hold, just an example)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... there is nothing you would not be able to do with your computer. Binary blobs are nasty, but they would not stop you from doing what you wanted if they could be freely shared. Freely sharing them would also make them easier to reverse engineer.
Seen through the lens of freedom, the issue is simple. The GPL's goal is to preserver your software freedoms: to do as you please with your computer, to modify the way your computer works and to be able to share these things with your neighbors. Copyright stands in the way of your doing that by keeping you from sharing your software or even details about how it works. It is against everything the GPL stands for. Newer nastier laws and restrictions should not make you a friend of older nasty restrictions.
New and more abominable laws like the DMCA make copyright look preferable, but it's really more of the same. You can't watch commercial DVD movies on GNU/Linux easily because the DMCA makes it illegal to share DeCSS, free software which decrypts them. If it were not for the DMCA, there would be no problem. Going further, it would not matter if some dumb company took free software, wrapped it up in DRM and sold it back to you if the DRM could be removed legally. The GPL has new clauses to fight new attempts to nullify previous incarnations of the GPL. The copyright holder's goals are still the same, to keep users helpless and divided, and none of it justifies the original offense of copyright.
The author is also using the old emotional attachment argument for free software to justify copyrights restrictions but it falls down with a moment's thought. I don't care if a big dumb software company uses my software as long as they don't use it to rob other people of their rights. In a world without copyright restrictions they could not do that. Indeed, I'd be happy if other people used my code and that includes people at big dumb companies.
Rational laws would keep to the spirit of the US Constitution which allowed copyright to promote the arts and spread culture. They would not keep you from sharing software with your neighbor or watching movies any more than they would keep you from sharing recipes.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The problem is not in the conflict between open source and copyright. The problems were brought about by the Sonny Bono extension act as well as that of the DCMA. Granting an unreasonable monopoly of control of content to the point of threatening fair use, even long after the author has died.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
The purpose of programming is to create something that performs a meaningful task. If an individual who spent their own time and effort coding to accomplish a task. I think they should have the right to do what they want with it. It should be as simple as I want to be paid for my time and effort so you can use this program which you did not have to use any prior knowledge or experience to make or I will release this program to people free to use. Why does it have to be any more complicated than this?
I'm not opposed to copyright, I'm opposed to current copyright terms.
20 years, renewable for 20 more if the copyright holder chooses to file a renewal. After that it falls into the public domain. This is not unreasonable.
Some would argue that 20 years is still too long, to which I say it's a lot better that what we have now and if we need to reduce it further we can revisit the issue in another 20 years.
Some would argue that 40 years is not long enough, to which I say anything longer than that can't possibly promote the progress of science and useful arts, and the current situation is in fact stifling the progress of science and useful arts.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
You can't copyright something that is already in the public domain.
If you place something under the GPL a company can still do something dishonest such as copy it and claim that your in violation of their copyright. This does not magically change.
In the US you can register public domain works very similiar to the way copyrighted works are registered.
I completely, 100% support your right to restrict your software. That's someone out of scope in a discussion of whether or not you can oppose copyright and support open source. If you prefer not to support open source, that's a valid choice. If you sometimes support and other times don't, that's fine too.
But if and when you are a advocating for Freedom, that is if you Support Open Source, and want your software to be Free, I would encourage you to avoid GPL and other restrictions. I would claim that You Can Oppose Copyright and Support Open Source. You might support copyright for other reasons, but it's not a necessary part of supporting open source.
Of course you can release your own stuff without copyright. Those of us who oppose it want everything released without it.
GP's sig: "The quickest way to become an atheist is to study the Bible thoroughly."
Actually, I became an atheist quicker than that method, as I was incapable of studying the bible thoroughly at age of about 7. My reasoning then was "I don't believe in magic and ghosts. God is magic, so I don't believe in god." I'm still pretty happy with the line of reasoning, although I could now express it more eloquently.
Curiously, John Wesley (founder of the Methodist church) reasoned very similarly, but with the opposite conclusion:
"Giving up [belief in] witches is, in effect, giving up [belief in] the Bible". (Quoted from memory.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Sorry for the confusion. here is the original story, where the problem with public domain appears.
--jeffk++
ipv6 is my vpn
Copyright simply screws everybody who didn't think of it first. It's nothing but a holdover from 19th century industrialists who wish to control everything.
Noooo, sorry, we were looking for patent. PATENTS let you screw over everyone who didn't think of it first. (For 20 years, at least - then everyone gets to use the technology you described publicly and in great detail on your patent application.)
Copyrights are necessary and important, moreso for the layman than the Evil Corporation(TM). The classical example is "You write a song and someone performed it and makes millions off of your work." Copyrights are what make that illegal, and what make the GPL and other "copyleft" schemes possible.
You might be tempted to say that without coypyright, the GPL wouldn't be necessary - everyone could use everything because there'd be no licenses of any kind to stop you. Let me knock down a straw-man for a minute and point out that the GPL and other F/OSS licenses do more than allow public-domain-style copying. The GPL, for example, requries someone who uses GPL-licensed code to release his code under the GPL, also.
Copyright laws require $big-evil-19th-century-industrialist-man to release the source code of his $program if his program uses GPL'd code. Without copyrights, he is free to take F/OSS and use them in his own $program, without giving the source code back to the community.
It's why we still burn petroleum and use lame, kludgy x86 processors while better existing technology rots on the shelf waiting for a higher price
Did somebody "copyright" (or are you still talking about "patents"?) the dark matter reactor, or the Magic Battery, or something? We use petroleum because it's a cheap (yes, it's still cheap relative to other fuels), efficient, and easily obtained fuel.
We use 8086 clones because of the insane amount of software produced for that architecture. An insane amount of software was produced for that architecture because Microsoft licensed their OS to Tandy and the like (something Apple wouldn't do), which brought cheap computing to the masses.
Better technology doesn't "wait for a higher price." If it's not worth buying, it's obviously that hot. Consumers wait for lower prices as technology improves.
Yes, I'm sure there are "better" processor architectures out there - and they're being used where the differences are actually worth the cost. Servers use all sorts of interesting procs and arrangements, where a faster server is worth dealing with the idiosyncrasies and higher costs of a more exotic chip. But, I'm sorry to say that your $359 Dell machine is not going to see a I've written machine language for x86, Z80, and 68K derivatives, and the x86 isn't all that bad - and with compilers and programming languages, how kludgey the underlying architecture is doesn't matter as long as it runs efficiently enough. Our Intel and AMD chips run fast enough, and they're cheap. The DEC Alpha was expensive, had complicated instruction set, and provided no advantages over the x86 for programmers or desktop users - so it's used on many-CPU servers and processor farms.
You managed to post to slashdot despite using an x86 machine, didn't you? I'm happy you suffered through the ordeal. The DEC Alpha "rotting on the shelf" will not help you one bit unless you start writing and posting a billion posts every second. The Itanium-series chips succeeded in the marketplace because they play nice with existing software, are cheaper, and provide the same benefits.
I'd love to see some specific examples of "better existing technology rotting on the shelf" due to patents or "19th century industrials" or whatnot.
(Score:0, Flamebait) There ya go! Send in the drones [stlyrics.com]... to fight for what they think is theirs...even when it's not. Stamp out the rabble rouser and his
DATABASE WOW WOW
what I can and can't do!
As near as I can tell, it's not about destroying copyright in the least bit, at least not by the reasonable, non-communist interests involved. It's about reasonable use, plain and simple - but, as is the case whenever someone brings the word "reasonable" into the debate, the specifics are often unclear and not all that plain or simple.
I think that, in an abstract sense, what those who support open source yet attack copyright are really attacking is the perception of a lack of integrity in the determination of copyright, and not so much an attack on copyright itself, but on those who are attempting to enforce it with draconian levels of restriction. For instance, those who stand for open source often also attack or disagree with much of the more restrictive OEM licensing which encourages and fosters vendor lock-in and an economic shackling to the provider of that copyrighted material. This applies whether it's a book, a CD, an iTunes song, or a movie. What the "establishment" copyright holders would like is that you've got an exclusive right to listen to it for a limited time, and then you've got to pay again - while at the same time giving the impression of permanence. It's not an honest approach.
What it comes down to in the end is: what is the person purchasing when they pay for copyrighted material, and to what end can they use it? When it is stated, it's usually after the fact and in complex and lengthy legalese, and the more technologically advanced (that is, new) the copyrighted material is, the seemingly more misunderstanding is encountered, and the more restrictions are put in place. We have no misunderstanding as to what is legal in regard to printed material, such as books, libraries, and the like. Online textual information is becoming quite widely understood as well, both in terms of social contract and legal outline. The only place where there is significant conflict - and confusion - is where there are monolithic economic interests involved, namely large corporations (Microsoft) or industry interests (RIAA/MPAA) leveraging for an economic control to guarantee their revenue. These groups are able to accomplish this solely on the basis of a lack of market competition - competition which is further limited through their stratified consolidation of control.
Again, it's not about the destruction of copyright. It's about copyright in the hands of original producers, for reasonable periods of time, with restrictions on those copyrights which prevent the copyright holder from keeping the users of their works hostage - economically, culturally, or otherwise. Copyright and open source are not contradictive; they are indeed supplementary - but only when copyright doesn't come to mean vendor lock-in.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
So your original statement that someone took public domain code and then sued stallman for copyright violation is wrong then?
WTF? There has never been a Perl interpreter in Emacs (only Elisp), and Project GNU predates Perl 1.000 by three years.
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-history.html
http://history.perl.org/PerlTimeline.html#1980s
I wish I could be in a woman's body.
Just like whinny programmers and artists. "I worked really hard for 6 months to make this. I should be paid the rest of my life for it."
boo hoo if that right goes away.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I had a strange feeling about this "essay"... I mean most people's concern and problems are not with or related to copyright issues, but with patents, more precisely not even with patents but with the patent system that we have these days. Being against copyright basically would mean being against any form of acknowledging other people's creative efforts, which is not something I would like to see happen.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
But Free Softare is not in any way dependent on copyright law.
Actually, it is. "Copyleft" is just the FSF's way of saying "reciprocity", which is the term a lawyer would use to describe the relationship between the licensor and the licensee under the GPL. That reciprocity is brought about through the protections of copyright law, which defines ownership. If you don't own it, you can't license it.
Lawrence Rosen, who has written several Open Source licenses and served as General Counsel for the OSI (Open Source Initiative) put it this way in his book Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law (free under the Academic Free License):
"The term copyleft, of course, needn't disappear. It still has great rhetorical value. It is a useful word to toss back at those who mistakenly complain that the GPL destroys copyrights; the GPL requires copyright law to create a copyleft bargain."
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
You must be against the USA's First Ammendment, then, because it is *also* "Restriction" (in the way you define it).
Just like the GNU GPL, it "Restricts" the ability of other people to impeach anyone's Freedom of Speech.
The GNU GPL, in fact, "Resctricts" the ability of other people to impeach anayone's software freedoms.
So yeah, the GNU GPL has a few rules so that everyone has freedom, and no one can remove it.
I'm perfectly fine with this kind of "rules of the game".
You don't read slashdot much, do you?
Just read enough slashdot and you'll run into enough people ranting and raving about how any form of IP is _fundamentally_ an abhomination, including not only patents and copyright, but also _trademarks_. Even if _some_ don't outright spell out "abolish copyright", they go at such great lengths about how it's fundamentally an oppressive evil, a major violation of your constitutional rights, _and_ a plot to plunder the economy of poorer countries... that, really, it's hard to see what other solution than abolishment would the author see there.
The MPAA and RIAA threads have been mentioned, so I'll add I've also run into them in topics about MS, BSA, piracy in China, etc. Really, just read enough of those and it's impossible to not run into the "abolish copyright" rants. Some even modded +5.
And then there are the clever guys who think they're all stealthy and subtle if they pack it as "fair use", "civil rights", etc. Add a bit of "information wants to be free", "copying != theft", "you can't stop the flow of information", etc, rhetoric. Most of them ammount to nothing more and nothing less than effectively abolishing copyright, if they had their way.
Get this: "copy right" is about who has the right to make copies. That was the original idea that the law was supposed to embody. The moment you've extended "fair use" to mean that anyone can make any number of copies, sell them in their shop, do anything to them, incorporate them in their own products without giving credit, set their own terms, etc, well, you effectively abolished any copyright protection. Effectively in that kind of world, even if you could still put "(C) Nefarity, 2007" on your work, it would have exactly zero use or meaning, so it's as good as abolished.
It's a bit, if you will, like having private property without having the right to lock your door, put any limits on who may enter your house, and can't stop them from leaving with your TV or selling tickets to watch the latest movie on your DVD player. I'm sure some could equally argue that distributing someone _else_'s TV is just a way of helping the neighbour, makes a better community, and indeed is as fundamental as the freedom of speech. (After all, it's exactly what "freedom 2" is in the Free Software Definition.) Anyway, the point I'm trying to make: at that point you effectively _don't_ have private property any more. If there are no legal limits you can actually enforce, then you just don't have it.
Same here. Copyright is all about private property of information. Whether that's good or bad, you decide, I'm not going into tha The moment you've removed all legal protections, and you can't tell people what they can do with your bits, and who can do it, you effectively don't have copyright any more.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Yes, the GPL relies on copyright to work. If it was abolished, many compnaies would take GPLed code and add it to their closed source products. there would be no legal way to stop them. But would this matter?
Mot contributors have no interest in making the software closed source. GCC and Linix have a lot of developers in academic circles and hardware development. Neither have any interest in locking down the code. Amateur developers have no interest in this either. Even some of the commercial distributors behave in a manner that suggests they prefer code to tremain open. Red Hat GPLed a lot of their code. They could have locked it down.
If you had a choice, what would you choose? The version you can modify yourself, or the version you can't? And would those who wish to close the source really do any better? They'd have to integrate every update to their code to keep it current. That's a lot of work.
The GPL usually has no effective legal teeth anyway. The copyright holder on most applications have no interest in suing violators. Even the FSF is very reluctant to do so. The main reason the GPL works is not because of legal forces but because of social forces.
The author in question cites an ethereal 'anti-copyright crowd' and proposes that this 'crowd' are those who would license their software under the GNU/GPL.
He also ignores the obvious fallacy of his argument:
Even if there is a crowd opposed to copyright (there probably is, somewhere on the planet), and even if it would release its software under the GPL (a subset of this hypothetical group), it does not follow those people cannot logically support the GLP consistent with their ideals. Arguably, the GPL is a clever means by which copyright law is used to turn itself on its head, ensuring information is shared rather than hoarded. Were there no copyright, the GPL would become superfluous (no one could lock down code/information via the law), and software libre would become the default. One might oppose copyright, but work within its legal framework from necessity by employing the GPL or similar free license.
I am not saying this is what most free software supporters want or believe (quite the opposite I imagine), just pointing out the obvious stupidity and logical fallacy of the argument "if you support the GPL, you must support copyright, else you're a hypocrite."
Alternatives to state sponsored monopolies such as copyright include author-right, the idea that the author keeps credit for their creation without imposing a monopoly on its distribution and use (i.e. plagiarism made explicitly illegal) and the notion of default royalties (e.g. the Author is entitled to some percent of any revenues generated by the use of their work, but is not allowed to restrict who may make use of that work to generate said profits. In other words, as the author of "Autonomy" I would not be allowed to stop Disney, Time-Warner, or Joe-Shmoe's backyard-shack publishing from using my work, but each of them would be required to pay me some percentage of their gross revenues, perhaps collected as a federal tax and disbursed to me by the government, or perhaps collected by myself or a third party I hire to make such collections (tax man collects info and shares it publicly via a central data clearing house, but my responsibility to collect funds).
There are any number of scenarios where copyright might be deprecated without harming authors' and creators' moral and financial rights, but where monopoly entitlements are eliminated. Few, if any, of these scenarios require that one renounce support of free software, or the GPL's implementation of free software which happens to make use of the existing copyright framework we are all currently required, by law, to live with.
This rant reads more like an ad homonem attack on free software advocates and opponents to existing copyright law, by (1) lumping the two very different groups together and (2) making sweeping logically falacious statements implying the two points of view are mutually incompatibel when they demonstrably are not (as I have just done, above.) This suggests an author with a political or economic ax to grind (perhaps as a shill for someone else), rather than someone interested in pondering the issues in an intellectually honest discussion.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Yes, it's true that the GPL couldn't be enforced without copyright. But many people in the FSF view the GPL only as a means to an end. It might be preferable, for example, if copyright were abolished and simultaneously there were a law requiring companies to ship source along with any binaries they ship.
Also, in other areas, there are big differences. For example, free software advocates probably don't generally have a problem with a dramatic shortening of copyright terms (down to 10-20 years) even if that means that the terms of the GPL couldn't be enforced afterwards. That's because GPL'ed software keeps getting extended and modified anyway. And, perhaps most importantly, the GPL doesn't rely on DRM, so many free software advocates would probably want DRM to go away.
Personally, I think the direction to move into is to limit copyright terms to 20 years after first publication of the work and to apply copyright only to content that can actually be copied (that is, content not protected by DRM).
What does matter is that the software economy could not thrive solely on open source. If people had to produce code - small people who do back office work and what have you - and then rely on installation, support, and various other charges, they couldn't make enough to live.
That isn't the case at all. It isn't just "celebs" like Bruce earn well, or generate wealth, from free software--a surprisingly huge number of unknown people (such as myself) do very well from free software. Why? Because free software generates a tremendous amount of wealth and opportunity unrelated to revenue streams reliant on software sales.
The mistake you (and the post you defend) make is to assume a zero-sum scenario dependent on software sales to generate wealth, when in point of fact the production of useful items (be it software or not) is a positive-sum activity that creates value greater than the sum of its parts, the vast majority of which is not directly related to the actual retail sale of the item. In situations where there is no physical scarcity (software), retail sales is entirely decoupled from these secondary, tertiary, and subsequent levels of wealth created (obviously, in the case of physical scarcity the sale is required for the item to exist, even though it is usually a vanishingly small percentage of the resulting wealth generated).
A purely open source world wouldn't have a Bill Gates (big loss), but will (and does) have dozens, perhaps hundreds, of millionaire entrepreneurs offering support, turn-key package solutions, custom installation, maintenance, support, administration, and customisation. And that's just the primary impact, secondary impacts include wealth generated by trading firms, banks, shops, and other businesses who make use of free software and hire local talent to tailor solutions to their needs, or simply install and support third-party turn-key solutions (in addition to the wealth created by the savings in licensing fees, and the savings in businesses not finding themselves beholden to orphaned software, forced to upgrade against their own best interests by vendors pulling support, etc.).
The only ones who lose in a free software/open source economy vs. a proprietary, closed-source economy are the Bill Gates of the world. Even the cadre of programmers who think they'll lose out because the business approach of Apple, Microsoft, or Oracle is all they know are unlikely to lose out at all, provided they are willing to learn new products and adjust their assumptions about how software generates wealth, and how demand for their talents and skills fit into such an economy.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
If you sell any product without making your source code available upon request, say by submitting it to the library of congress, then you must pay three times as much sales tax.
Ain't complex, just increase the taxes on closed source transactions.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Doing what you suggest would not happen often if at all, since deliberately killing a company and raiding their assets is illegal and very hard to hide (especially if you do it regularly).
And in any case, why is this a problem? The raiding company doesn't get copyright on what they steal (so again, why would they: they get nothing out of it except what they've given EVERYBODY) so it's still open.
If someone stops selling a product under copyright, either pass the copyright over to someone else who will or allow anyone to sell it.
Along with copyRIGHT there should be a copyRESPONSIBILITY: if you're the only one allowed to make copies, you MUST make copies.
The only problem really is that OSS has code and is worth FAR more than binary blobs.
I have suggestions for software copyright: only allow copyright on works that COME WITH SOURCE. You don't have to give any rights with that source (so while copyright lasts on the work, you cannot compile or take code) and even in that case, if you had a choice between "Microsoft Windows" and "Fred Windows" which would you trust (forgetting MS's practices)?
Additionally, as long as they support the software, copyright should last. When it is officially unsupported, it goes PD.
With this idea, you have a reason to keep code working (you keep the rights) but when those rights die, the public can actually USE them. Adittionally, while copyright lasts, the code is inspiring or educating coders in much the same way as contemporary music/books/movies inspire other musicians/writers/directors.
Who can argue against that?
What else is new?
Lawrence Lessig is saying just that for many years and he acknowledges that it is mostly in harmony with Richard Stallman's ideas. He doesn't propose abolition of copyright, but a constructive reform.
Lessig's "Free Culture" is one of the best books i ever read: http://www.free-culture.cc/
Who, you ask? Maybe the state?
See the first link on the list on http://newsbyte.blogspot.com/
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Hold the feminist horses!
Dude(tte), your argumentation is shifting from the technical merrit of copyright to how men are sexist and women don't find it funny.
Whether you call women who have sex for money prostitutes, whores, courtisanes, or business-oportunists, it has little bearing on copyright and the GPL.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
abolish copyright. Apparently this small detail have slipped the author.
Read radical news here
someone has probably already said it (dont have time to check) but this isnt applicable to all Open Source software, just Free Software (TM). just because it's Open Source doesnt mean it's GPL or the like.
So, he is arguing against a position that I've never heard anyone holding.
These members of the anti-copyright crowd cite the GPL (GNU Public License) as an alternative to copyright without any sense of the ironic fact that the GPL can't exist without copyright.
Starting with RMS himself, most people *either* say copyrigth is fine -- GPL is our prefered copyrigth-notice OR they say: copyrigth is fundamentally a bad idea, but aslong as we've got it, we've got no choice but to make the best of it, GPL is our attempt at this.
The biggest group I know are somewhere in between; They accept copyrigth, but consider life+100 years completely ridicolous. Copyrigths on software should probably expire in a decade. My prefered state of affairs would be no DMCA or similar law, 5 year copyrigth on software, and as much of that software as possible under the GPL. (yeah, this would mean you could take 6-year-old GPL-software and put it in a closed product. Fine with me !)
It's sorta like the MANY people who say that software-patents are BAD, but aslong as we do have them, it migth be worthwhile to gather up an Open Source defencive patent-pool.
Who *are* these people he argues against ? Do they even exist ?The past years, if articles talked about copyright in relation to something they hate, the music industry, the Slashdot crowd screamed to abolish it, downmodding everyone with reason and pointing out that any other view is evil. However, if you switch to talk about it in relation to something they love, it suddenly turns into a fuck-fest karma whore GPL gangbang affair where everybody seems to agree on the value of copyright. You, sirs, are a bunch of hypocrites ;) People should have realised from the start that their hatred of the music industry or of Microsoft does not equal hatred of copyright. Or at least that the consequences of removal are huge. But it's either one way or the other: either the rights on stuff remain with the people that made the stuff, which sounds pretty fair, or anyone that makes something that can be copied, including software developers, work for the good of huminity in general and have to get fed by selling t-shirts.
All economic systems throughout history are based on trading specializations. Removing copyright inherently breaks that. In order for it to work, you must have a world with prosperity for all, and we're not there yet.
If you want the world to be freer as a result of what you produce, you don't necessarily achieve that by facilitating restriction. Acting 'politically', you can achieve more freedom in the world than if you'd acted naïvely.
Law, in general, is a similar concept; good laws create freedom through selective restriction. Perhaps there are few good laws, but a very small proportion of the population would argue that there were none. The closest that you would generally get is that the last few laws should be removed as the system's dead weight outweighs their benefit.
Co-incidentally, those opposed to copyright would hold to a similar position in that restricted field: the copyleft licences are good, but in general copyright is bad, and getting rid of the deadweight of copyright law would bring greater benefits than the comparatively minor cost of neutering such copyleft licenses. Given that using copyleft licenses is a political act that is aimed at maximising freedom, someone thus motivated would see that their intent would be better achieved by squashing copyright altogether.
For the record, I favour limited copyright, say 14 years plus a possible 14 year extension that has to be applied for.
Wikileaks, no DNS
> GPL is 1984, War Is Peace,
And you're an idiot.
> If you're restricting things to help MY freedom, I ask you to stop.
> Real freedom is far better than the Restriction Through Freedom nonsense.
Goverment and laws restrict my "real freedom" to anal rape you when I want to (The freedom I would have if we two would met somwhere in the woods), in order to preserve your freedom to not be someones ass bitch when they (or in our case, I) see fit. They are restricting things (Those bastards!!) to preserve YOUR freedom. Do you ask them to stop?
The GPL restricts my so called "freedom" to sue the hell out of people who dare to copy and share code YOU or someone else wrote and I only extended and embraced.
I was just about to point out that the GPL is not isomorphic to open source software but I decided to check first.
It seems that OpenAFS support might have to be pulled from Linux because of a change to a header.
The GPL keeps people from using FOSS.
See, the big problem is that the GPL is an attempt to use copyright law against itself, in a kind of legal ju-jitsu. That's its primary goal, and supporting the spread of liberally copyrighted software (to avoid the free/open debate) is secondary. So you can support copyright and oppose open source, support copyright and support open source, oppose copyright and support open source, and even oppose copyright and oppose open source.
Say what? You can oppose copyright and oppose open source?
Sure. Microsoft's done that for years, and their open source efforts have been kind of passive-aggressive...
Microsoft and many other people who are yelling the strongest about copyright violations are the folks who want to replace copyright law with contract law. They only use copyright to force people into operating on a contract basis, and pushed through the DMCA with its explicit clauses to make copyrights subservient to contracts. Copyright law grants rights to the user as well as the creator, and so anyone who licenses software under an "end user license agreement" that restricts those rights is just as opposed to copyrights as the most rabid GPL worshipper.
- Copyright term extensions have been extended by an order of magnitude from the 14-year term established by the Statute of Anne.
- In many industries, the standard of production is so high that it takes dozens of people to create a work. Therefore, most works in these industries fall under the "work made for hire" rule, where the publisher is deemed the author.
And I restate the only legitimate claim in ALL of this is that of authorship. Those who plagiarize are the only ones that should be looked after. When I write a song, how can I tell whether I am the rightful author or I am unintentionally plagiarizing an existing copyrighted work? As seen in Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, 420 F. Supp. 177 (SDNY 1976), the damages for even unintentional infringement can be high enough to bankrupt an indie artist. "My Sweet Lord" on Wikipedia gives more background.You mean you are not yet born? And your mother set up an internet connection into her uterus? (Wireless, I guess
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Lisp, not perl...
I support the right of people and organizations to completely ignore the GPL. Software longs to be free- when someone gives away their stuff away for free, they need to stop holding on to it.
Fred Windows, no question. I find random 3rd parties do a far better job than Microsoft ever has.
No "Fred Windows" that I know of, but I use a BartPE Windows on a regular basis.
The devil is in the details. Microsoft would do the absolute bare minimum to be considered "supported" for centuries, if necessary...
One patch a year... One guy on the telephone support line, who's only there 1 day a week... A handful of copies of the old software available in various stores for a sticker price of $100,000... etc.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
correct, it was wrong. sorry.
jeffk
ipv6 is my vpn
...because you take other people's "property" do do it.
If you create the work completely from scratch then that's one thing but that's not
what's being discussed. People want the "right" or the "freedom" to take other people's
property and treat it like it was their own and have the exclusive righ tot exclude
other's from it.
You don't get to tell everyone that derivative works are your own, it's as simple as that.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Twenty years is still far too long. I think the right number is five years ...
You are not considering that some software is under development for several years before release, that early version may be shown outside the company a year or more in advance of release.
That way the producers get 95+% of the potential revenues, and people get to remix (think "reuse" for code) it before it's completely culturally obsolete.
You are also failing to consider that some software has an income generating lifespan beyond five years. The "guts" of 1.0 may appear in 2.0 and 3.0.
You also fail to address a very important issue, that of investment. The ability to find investors to support the development of a software product would virtually disappear. There would be few small startups. The big corporations that have motives beyond direct revenue from a software product, synergies(1), would become more powerful.
I understand your sentiment, but things are far more complicated than you are allowing for.
(1) Although grossly overused by business types, "synergy" is a real term, basically f(a + b) > f(a) + f(b)
I oppose copyright. It needs to go away. I would have absolutely no problem with a sensible copyright with clearly defined limits. That kind of copyright could actually do a lot of good. Giving an incentive to authors and artists to publish their works and release them to the public domain after a short period of time seems like a fair trade.
The problem is, we already had that. The original term of 14 years with the option of extending for another 14 was more than fair. That copyright was pushed and extended and expanded to near limitless proportions. We gave them an inch; they took a mile. I'd be all for copyright if I thought reform was possible. I don't think it is. It seems that it has come down to an all-or-nothing situation. Copyright is just too high a price to pay for the debatable incentive it provides.
You had a chance until you posted on slashdot.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
and I think that is where the poster misses the point is that the GPL exists because copyright exists. Now if copyright wouldn't exist and everything is by law in accessible public domain, there would be no need for a GPL since everything ever created will need to be in public domain. The loopholes being used in GPL **cough**TiVo**cough** would then also be circumvented as would all the who-ha about GPLv3, the DMCA, DRM etc.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Stallman copylefted GNU Emacs after UniPress took Gosling Emacs proprietary. This page explains the impetus.
So you replace copyright law with strengthened consumer protection law that makes such retaliation illegal? If you're going to refute arguments in favour of the abolition of copyright, at least try to refute the best arguments.
http://outcampaign.org/
With respect to Free Source (and OS), copyright is only a means used to keep it free and open. There are plenty of other ways, such as contracts. In a world without copyright, there can still be agreements that say essentially what the GNU Public License says. And unlike the average EULA, they could be just as enforceable as the current means. Perhaps it wouldn't make sense to call it "copyleft", but it certainly is still possible.
Without copyright, the GPL would still be necessary, and possible.
p.s. I thought it was IBM being free and easy with the PC architecture that caused the PC revolution? And that x86 is popular because that's what IBM happened to toss into the PC? Apple and others would not bless efforts to write OSes for their machines, at least not for MacIntoshes. (There were a fair number of 3rd party DOSes for the Apple II.) MS and Intel were merely the most successful or lucky companies to get on the PC wave.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
if there was no copyright, then it would be like everything was GPL'ed...
what a self-important jerk...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
It is not difficult nor contradictory to support "open source" as well as seek to end copyright. It's so trivial that children seem to have a natural grasp of it.
Child: "I don't want to take my medicine!"
Parent: "It's grape flavored, and you love grapes!"
Child: "Well OK I'll take it but I still don't want to take it."
The principle is the same. One can be for abolishing copright monopoly whilst being in favor of a less draconian use of the existing copyright system to demonstrate that the draconian claims are invalid and that copyright as a whole is not a mandate.
We make these choices all the time. I don't *WANT* to go to work, but if I get paid I'm more likely to do so. Hell I might even enjoy it. But that doesn't mean I want to spend my life *working*.
See, not so hard at all.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Copyright needs to be abolished, as do patents and all IP law.
Then the GPL would not be needed at all.
I've said repeatedly that people like Lawrence Lessig are fighting with both hands tied behind them because they support the oxymoronic notion of "intellectual property". No matter what they do, they will always be forced to concede that anybody owning IP can do anything they want with it. Stating that IP owners should be "more open" about their property or that IP laws should be "limited" simply isn't going to work.
There IS NO "balance" here. IP law was NEVER about "stimulating invention". It was ALWAYS about monopoly and control. It has never been established by logic, or by any other evidence, that IP law is required for human invention or human economics to succeed. That has always been a "theory" used as cover for enabling the control of people's behavior over and above property considerations. It is an extension of contract law over and above property law. There is no economic justification - as an extension of economic theory - for it.
"Just say NO" to intellectual property.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Ain't complex, just increase the taxes on closed source transactions.
Bzzzzt. Utterly stupid idea. That is complex. Sales tax varies by state, county, and city. Do companies in New Hampshire pay under the same scheme? New Hampshire has no sales tax. How long before all companies are selling by "mail order" out of New Hampshire, the same way all credit card companies are based in Maryland, which allows the most usurious interest rates?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
..I generally assume some intelegence on the part of comment readers. There are no shortage of obvious variation based upon whatever taxation system you happen to prefer using. A national sales tax has been discussed. It could be part of income tax instead. etc. But the basica idea of taxing closed source transactions is still valid.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Did you miss the part where he said that no one's printing the book any more, not just no one in the United States? Why does it matter that he's not in the US, and the book wasn't published in the US? The copyright term in his situation is asinine; it's asinine here as well--just replace 1900 with 1924 and you're in the same boat.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
What does matter is that the software economy could not thrive solely on open source. If people had to produce code - small people who do back office work and what have you - and then rely on installation, support, and various other charges, they couldn't make enough to live.
The economy is better off without your restrictions. From what I've read, most software people make their living by making software work for a company and they are better served by free software. Like most people, they get by on their ability to solve problems. It's a tiny minority that actually makes a living from non-free, precompiled binaries in a box. For that tiny minority, the rest of us suffer the DMCA and other methods to lock people in that you are talking about. You can keep them to yourself.
Your argument is just another variant of the economic arguments made against free software from day one. The massive success of GNU, Debian and other organizations prove this argument was flawed. Free software is not only sustainable, it's use and production are economically sound.
Put another way - Free Software is the only way I'd consider solving a new problem for myself or an employer. Non free software's low quality and inflexibility add long term costs that are impossible to justify.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'm not at all opposed to the First Amendment or other restrictions on government action against citizens.
You draw a false comparison. We're talking about freedom to use code, specifically whether one can oppose copyright and support open source. I say that you can by using the Public Domain. The GPL does not create any additional free(dom) software over and above what can be done without copyright by using Public Domain status. Instead, the GPL merely restricts non-free usage. You might want to do that, but that's a separate question and none of it relates to the First Amendment in the way that you suggest.
What freedom of mine is enhanced by GPL? Only the `freedom' to know that someone else isn't doing something that I don't like with it. Does that actually hurt me? I don't think so.
In terms of actual freedom, Public Domain status is just as effective at supporting open source without relying on copyright.
You say: You don't get to tell everyone that derivative works are your own, it's as simple as that.
True. That is the restriction of the GPL, with perhaps a bit of spin. Spun the other way, I could say: You don't get credit for your new idea if it made use of any GPL-rather-than-Free ideas.
If the wheel were GPLed, then the Wright Brothers couldn't have called their derivative work (their plane included wheels) their own by your reasoning.
When an idea is Free, it is there for all to use, in free and non-free ways. GPL wants to make things Free-but-not-*too*-free. It's a restriction relying on copyright, and it's a restriction that's not necessary to Support Open Source.
The First Amendment restricts the ability to impeach your speech. The GNU GPL restricts the ability to impeach your software freedom.
You can ignore facts all they long and keep repeating misunderstanding as if by mere repetition it would become true, but you will not be very successful.
And you can try to force the analogy all you want, but knowing that someone else might do something with my code that I didn't approve of is not the same as anal rape. The fact that you suggest otherwise speaks to the credibility of your `argument'.
Sorry, wrong sender. I confused you with the person that pushed *that* bad analogy.
If you think that not having the GPS somehow protects what you can express, please present that argument. Otherwise, you're just waving the First Amendment around because it sounds good and has something to do with someone's rights.
I apologize for confusing you with the anal-rape-analogy person, but your analogy is just as contrived. The things that someone can do with my Public Domain code and my GPL-instead-of-free code have nothing to do with my freedom of expression. The differences are purely limited to how I can restrict others from doing with the ideas that I've already chosen to share with the public at large.
The First Amendment analogy is a bad one, period.