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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.
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.
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?