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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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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*
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.