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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.

6 of 550 comments (clear)

  1. abolish copyright by nefarity · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Who are these amazing people that want to abolish copyright?

  2. You can oppose copyright ... and support BSD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Funny, I've never heard anyone say BSD wasn't open source.

  3. Another sophomoric Sunday blog post. by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 5, Insightful
    It's Sunday again, and there's another out-of-left-field editorial about Open Source just like last week. I wonder if Slashdot editors have a "flame schedule" to amp up the readership during what would otherwise be slow periods.

    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.
  4. The problem with copyright... by mehgul · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. exactly - straw man argument by Baldur_of_Asgard · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:In a world without copyright... by dircha · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "But without copyright, one would also have no need to enforce the GPL, as any releases made would be into the public domain assuming it is possible to disassemble the software."

    I think there's some confusion here about Open Source and Free Software. The GPL is just a license that uses a technique called Copyleft to proliferate Free Software in the current legal setting. But there is plenty of non-Copylefted Free Software.

    The FSF advocates that all software should be Free Software; software that satisfies the 4 essential freedoms of software users (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html). But Free Softare is not in any way dependent on copyright law. The definition of Free Software makes no reference to copyright. And you don't need to settle for copyright vs. essential freedoms and resort to relying on disassembling software or something like that.

    Instead, you can advocate that software should be covered by law that mandates the 4 essential freedoms of software users, in addition to, or in place of copyright.

    The FSF (the publisher of the GPL) is not anti-copyright per se. It is pro-software freedom. It is a logically sound position. If this position is appealing to you, read up on it. Don't let blogger prattle throw you like that.