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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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
Actually patents are what protect method of implementation of an idea, and you were at one time supposed to bring a model or at least a drawing(since perveted by relaxed definition of what is patentable) of that method to the patent office. A single idea can have many methods, each one of them individually patentable*. For example, look at the fight between Glenn Curtiss and the Wright Brothers. Aircraft advancement** slowed to a crawl until the government took over the patent during world war I. And that's when things really took off, so to speak. Anyway, I am saying you have no right to exclusivity. You only have the real natural right to, for lack of a better word, "authorship", simply because it is impossible for one to be a creator of something that was created by someone else. IP*** is a fallacious claim of ownership. You have no right to dictate what I can do with what I possess. My copy is my copy. Yours is yours. What you are trying to do is to recollect the smoke that was let out of the bottle. Well, you can't. Only by the use of physical force can you make such false claims. Copyright was created out of the exact same reasoning 297 years ago as it is used to today, to protect an established industry. 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. Distribution and use is not for you or anyone else to control. There is no logical defense for operating this way. Attribution is your only rightful claim, and it is one that even I would defend.
*didn't help Curtiss though.
**In every instance I can find IP law has always slowed developement of virtually everything until it copyright/patent expired.
***which covers copyrights AND patents, so patents are not irrelevant. They are every bit as much a part of the picture as copyright.
What?
I've kept up with this issue for years, and I can't think of anyone who wants to abolish copyright outright.
... fall into disuse since their benefit is lost.
Allow me to be the first to discuss this underrepresented side with you then!
Part of the intent of copyright law is to allow a content producer control over how the information they create is distributed. This is done so profit isn't "lost", and to prevent plagiarism, and in the case of GPL (article topic) to keep information open (among other things). But consider if those problems that were once solved by copyright could be solved by something else that additionally doesn't have to restrict information sharing to accomplish them. Surely having all of the benefits with none of the detriments is the best case scenario!
The benefits are immediate, fair use of information extends to cover entire works (full novels, movies, news articles, journals, tv shows, etc.) and they could be sharable, commonly accessible and searchable. There could be a totally legal Google on steroids that contains the body of all known information produced by humanity. Things that hinder information distribution, DRM, DMCA,
Now the methods to accomplish this are many and varied. Freely shared information for example can be done via a buffet-like information access system. If a chunk of federal taxes pays for information, and the people (citizens, people specializing in various fields, reputation networks, etc) can still decide which information content producers should get more profits than others, then capitalism influences are still at work. In this method the information is still treated as information and not some limited "product" by limiting the actions of everybody that comes in contact with it. The content producers are paid, people can share it all the want, there can be a great online system to automate much of this. In my mind if such a system could be worked out without the people balking at the prices for the buffet then it would easily trump any system built on artificial restrictions to information.