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You Can't Oppose Copyright and Support Open Source

Posted by kdawson on from the baby-with-the-bathwater dept.

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.

4 of 550 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Another sophomoric Sunday blog post. by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

    --
    Bruce Perens.
  2. Re:The problem with copyright... by Dirtside · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    --
    "Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
  3. Re:abolish copyright by KutuluWare · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  4. RTFM by dircha · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!