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.

Comments

Wait

[The Bungi]

I thought the author was going to make the mistake of saying that without copyright the GPL would be useless, but he actually makes a good point. I think the problem with licenses like the GPL and the Creative Commons are all about sticking it to The Man and a sort of social statement to the effect that IP ownership laws are broken, but they rely on an imagined legal and social framework that simply does not exist yet - and probably never will, though that's just my opinion. The efectiveness of these licenses (which overwhelmingly deal with distribution rather than use) wobbles on top of the very foundation they are trying to destroy. And none of them have addressed just what exactly is going to happen after they manage to topple it down.

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.

Right....

[bky1701]

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.

Re:Another sophomoric Sunday blog post.

[Bruce Perens]

Not all of us can make a living being open source gasbags, you know. If it weren't for software patents, I would be a poor man.

Prove it. I looked, and could not find any patents issued to "Anonymous Coward". :-)

And by the way, my employer makes Open Source software for Wall Street investment banking firms. I am, however, also paid by customers (usually also Wall Street investment banks, but sometimes other entities) who want me to teach or lecture.

Bruce

Re:The problem with copyright...

[Dirtside]

In this case you're wrong; anything published before 1923 is now in the public domain, regardless of when the author died. Source: Cornell

Re:abolish copyright

[KutuluWare]

The author of TFA is seriously confused about a lot of things, one of those things being the goals of the Free Software Foundation. Stallman is probably one of the most extreme ultra-liberal people to ever sit at a keyboard, and yet I don't think he's ever once pushed for total abolition of copyright.

What RMS and ideologically similar people have proposed is this: software should not be covered under copyright law. You can see this ideal most clearly if you head over to http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html and read the two articles called "Why Software Should {Be Free,Not Have Owners}". While I disagree with his philosophy, he makes a pretty solid empirical case for why software should not be "owned" in the same sense that books are "owned" by their author or art is "owned" by the artist.

The author of the article also fails to pick up on a key point about the GPL and why it exists: because there is copyright law, the FSF must use copyright law to accomplish their goals. If software was suddenly declared ineligible for copyright, there'd be no need for the GPL because no proprietary software company could prevent people with access to their source code from modifying or redistributing it, nor could they prevent people from modifying or distributing binary copies of the software. This is a small step back from the current state where the group of people with access to the GPL'd source code includes everyone with a copy of the binary, but it's a giant leap forward in eliminating all the complex legal issues around who can copy what and where.



--K

RTFM

[dircha]

Looks like another college sophomore just discovered the GPL.

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-fr eedom.html

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!