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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.
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!
"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.
It's a fundamentally good idea; people who create something have exclusive rights to sell it. Where things go wrong is when people decide to meddle with it, like continuously extending the period that it applies. Something like a 5 year limit would be appropriate in today's fast paced world. Just think; who here wants to buy a DVD or CD that is over 5 years old? Not unless it was originally issued in some other format, right? Don't confuse copyright with the fallacy of "intellectual property". Intellectual Property is a collection of laws (copyright, patents, trademarks, etc.) which should never be grouped together, because each is different and for a different purpose.
We only need GPL because of copyright. When it's all gone, all will be well. Trust me on this one. The only thing to be concerned about is plagiarism. Everything else is fluff. No matter who "takes" the code, they can't stop you from using it also. And without copyright restrictions you are free to build on the works of others and everybody will be given the opportunity to do just that. There is so much superior tech(Alpha chip!) being locked down and kept off the streets because of copyright. This must end now. Jeeze, this is so redundant. I've said this so many times, and many others have also, with much more eloquence than I can muster with my seventh grade writing skills.
What?
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.
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.
I'm not a big fan of the GPL, but I don't think public domain or a BSD-type deal is going to work either. But for everything I've ever read from Stallman and friends, I don't really think they have it down, either. It's as if they are sitting there hoping something will happen that will validate their position and everything will be kumbaya and honky dory. What that is they have no idea.
Stallman can rewrite his license until the cows come home, but without some real change in the legal area it won't really make much difference. And piling restrictions up on top of the GPL can only go so far. Not his fault - that's just reality.
And that's just for software... wait 'til you get into music and images and whatnot. The Creative Commons are in the same bind.
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.
The FSF and OSS movements were NEVER about abolishing copyright. They were about abolishing vendor-lockin and proprietary messes [re: file formats for instance].
GPL was always a copyright license, in fact, ALL licenses are copyright driven. The only terms which are not is the public domain which cannot, by definition, have a copyright applied to it.
Anyone who thinks OSS is about abolishing copyright doesn't know what they are talking about.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
This is kind of like saying that if you are against socialism you should be against unions, or if you are for the death penalties for murder you should be for it for assault as well.
Just because you support the GPL as a good fix in the current climate does not mean you approve of the current climate. BSD fails for many projects because a company will walk in, grab the code, edit it a little to add proprietary components, sell it and hurt the development of the free project. See wine.
While the GPL isn't ideal, it defeats the "I am going to take your code, make a small change and call it mine" that wouldn't exist if no copyright existed in the first place. If copyright didn't exist, decompiling and DRM cracks would quickly negate any attempts to restrict use of code/programs.
Take music for example. Some guy makes a background track under the GPL; people use it in their GPL songs or pay (for the development of more free background tracks) to use it in non-free songs. Then take one who puts it under something BSD-ish. The RIAA comes in, sticks Brittney Spears on top of it, makes millions of $$$ and goes around suing people that didn't pay them for what they only edited.
Not to say that's likely, but it's a good example. If all open projects used the BSD, it's more likely than not MS/Apple would have just taken the best, stuck it in a proprietary package and sold it, making it so open projects could never get ahead or even catch up. Hell Apple already did this, with BSD itself none the less. How many times do people on slashdot alone say that they used to use Linux/BSD until OS X came around that had all the best of open software, except the fact that it was truly open?
So far as I care, the only reason I use the GPL and not BSD is because I don't want someone else having a full copyright on something using what I created. That's not why I created it.
Great Intellect...
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.
If you're a libertarian, you can't be for government reform.
If you're a green-peace activist, you can't drive to rallys.
If you're a vegetarian, you can't eat yogurt.
Now to be fair, the article has points that aren't drowned in sensationalism. Like, for example, how non-copyrighted works could be taken away and used by corporations. Which, in a copyright-free environment, would be perfectly OK.
The opening "joke" is key to understanding the logic. Either you'd sleep with someone for money OR you wouldn't, price is irrelevant to whether you're a whore or not. Similarly, either you'd never use copyright for anything OR you would, context be damned. So Open Source advocates who see OS as the only way to make something work under the current system are tarred with the same impractical black-and-white brush as a woman who would sleep with someone for enough money to guarantee a college education and financial security for her children.
Utter lack of taste or tact aside, this is just one philosopher shouting that a different philosopher should change their symbols, with no grounding in utility or practicality.
The ______ Agenda
at least in my opinion. Remember, my opinion is worth what you paid for it.
/. would have much of a problem. This truly is a case of the people speaking with one mind, even if there are people who can't figure out what is being said.
Nobody is against copyright per se. What people are against is how copyright is used to damage the principle for which it was founded. Artists should have copyright to their work. Distribution companies should not. If you write some really nifty software you should have copyrights to it, not a patent unless it seems to revolutionize the software industry or some part of it.
What people (/. in general) are against is using that copyright authority to run roughshod over the public with it. Nobody really wants musicians to give their art away for free. What we see today is a backlash on the business model of the RIAA and their member companies. I don't think that there are many people that aren't willing to pay a modest/reasonable price for a CD. They do however want to be able to use that CD and its content where ever they want to, including loaning it to a friend, reselling it, or making backup copies so they don't have to purchase it multiple times. These issues have nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with how the **AA (and consequently the government) abuse copyright law to line their own pockets.
The people who write OSS software deserve the copyrights to that, and I often contribute to those projects that I feel I use and enjoy. Hell, I even once bought a copy of winzip. As far as patents go, even the USPTO/courts are starting to realize that the patent situation is totally out of control, and harming business interests as well as damaging the public good that it was meant to foster. Notice that recent rulings may invalidate the patents that Verizon holds that were used to nearly drive Vonage out of business. That is exactly the opposite of what they were meant to do.
To say that the F/OSS community in general doesn't like copyright or patents is absurd. What they don't like (and I'm taking liberties in speaking for them) is how they are used to drive unjust revenues at the expense of the public and the original content producers. iTMS is evidence that people will pay for content if it is usable, though I have some questions about how ultimately useful iTunes DRM'ed music actually is.
If patents and copyrights were applied in a logical and fair manner, producing the productivity and benefits they are supposed to, nobody on
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
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*
Most people aren't trying to desperately abolish copyright. Copyright as it stands must be removed and replaced with, say, the original intent for copyright, which is a reasonably short (20 years?) monopoly on an intellectual property to allow and encourage people to think up new ideas, and be assured of a degree of income from that.
Copyright should never persist beyond 20 years since date of copyright, even if the creator dies during this period (for the purpose of the estate of the copyright holder, I am thinking of the children after all).
Just think of everything that has been devised 20 years ago and earlier. A lot of rich content could be in the public domain. Imagine the innovation that could take place with people creating derivative works!
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Looks like another college sophomore just discovered the GPL.
r eedom.html
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-f
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!
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.
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.
If you created an environment in which secrecy/superiority did NOT give an advantage, but sharing and collaborating did, then those would become the dominant traits and we would be sitting here discussing how these were the "natural" way to be. In societies dominated by "trial-by-combat" ideologies and might-makes-right, you see neither secrecy nor collaboration, but you do get a most diverse selection of warlords, strongmen and hangers-on.
There are societies on Earth where they haven't even invented numbers and have no concept of counting beyond none-few-lots. Nor are those societies easily capable of learning numbers. It is not merely that they have never come across them, the entire part of the brain dealing with logic has developed to process other information instead. Yes, the brain really is that flexible in the way it develops. Virtually nothing is hard-coded in at birth. How we are, what we do - these are all programmed in as you grow. Don't like the program? Then teach something different to the next generation. They're not confined to the limitations of those who lived before.
Ok, so it is clear from all of that that I believe that we could easily(!) mould society in whatever image we feel like. Ok, maybe not easily, but we could do it. It is possible. What is "human" is ultimately defined by us, we are not limited by that definition. The next question would then be "SHOULD we develop a society without selfishness, secrecy, one-upmanship, etc?"
This is not a trivial question. We have no evidence, on the level of entire modern societies, that this would be socially stable. It would be doable, but what happens next? Has society evolved the selfish traits because of the demands of growth, or are the selfish traits vestigial remnants of a long-decayed, long-surpassed requirement? Is copyright closer to the brain of society or its appendix? This is important - you wouldn't want to lobotomize humanity, but if overeager Intellectual Property has become a serious case of appendicitis, then to not remove it could be lethal.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
...the anti-rain crowd cite the umbrella as an alternative to getting wet, without any sense of the ironic fact that umbrellas can't exist without rain. They're proposing a solution while simultaneously complaining about the weather. While using an umbrella is less restrictive than staying indoors, it must be held at the proper angle in order to offer any protection. It is a way to keep dry. But without rain, umbrellas would never be opened.
As the parent article points out. GPL is about restricting what people can do with software. ``Oh, but only the bad people that want to bad things'' is a Richard Stallman whine. Do you want it free? Then let it be free. That means without restrictions. Without the restrictions that I want. Without the restrictions that you want. Without the restriction that Richard Stallman has blessed.
Freedom is more free than restriction. How difficult is that?!?!
Freedom also works. When you make something free, someone will do something with it that you will not like. Others will do things that are great. Trust freedom. Let your software be free using Public Domain and don't buy into the bulsh*t mealy mouthedness that is the GPL.
And equally, you could reverse engineer their modified product and implement the changes in the original version. Effectively, if you steal something from the public domain, the public domain has the right to steal it back.
I think the Stallman ideal is a society where everyone voluntarily follows the tenets of the GPL without being forced to. Without copyright and with the unrestrained ability to reverse engineer released products, the effect is mostly the same.
As the parent article points out. GPL is about restricting what people can do with software.
Really? A large part of the GPL is restricting how <B>closed source</B> applications can use GPL'd content. Abolishing copyright law would mean that those restrictions are superfluous and so a large part of what the GPL restricts would no longer exist. While the other restrictions would also have to go, you don't have to be for the entire GPL to be for the GPL.
GPL would have no effect if there was no copyright. It would just become meaningless.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
28 years plus a 28 year extension, and you actually have to file for a copyright and put copyright notices on the work.
If this law were still in place everything before 1951 would be in the public domain. Imagine a world where you could download
all your old 1930s and 40s films online. In the year 2016 if the 1909 copyright act were still in place, everyone could be trading tv series
from the 1950s.
The fact that most people dont realized between 1790 and 1976 only 1 extension had been granted from 14 to 28 years.
The question the copyright lawyers of 1976-2006 have to explain is how all these extensions encouraged the promotion of
arts and sciences. How does it encourage the creation of new works to grant extensions to estates and corporations?
Sorry for the confusion. here is the original story, where the problem with public domain appears.
--jeffk++
ipv6 is my vpn
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
What does matter is that the software economy could not thrive solely on open source. If people had to produce code - small people who do back office work and what have you - and then rely on installation, support, and various other charges, they couldn't make enough to live.
That isn't the case at all. It isn't just "celebs" like Bruce earn well, or generate wealth, from free software--a surprisingly huge number of unknown people (such as myself) do very well from free software. Why? Because free software generates a tremendous amount of wealth and opportunity unrelated to revenue streams reliant on software sales.
The mistake you (and the post you defend) make is to assume a zero-sum scenario dependent on software sales to generate wealth, when in point of fact the production of useful items (be it software or not) is a positive-sum activity that creates value greater than the sum of its parts, the vast majority of which is not directly related to the actual retail sale of the item. In situations where there is no physical scarcity (software), retail sales is entirely decoupled from these secondary, tertiary, and subsequent levels of wealth created (obviously, in the case of physical scarcity the sale is required for the item to exist, even though it is usually a vanishingly small percentage of the resulting wealth generated).
A purely open source world wouldn't have a Bill Gates (big loss), but will (and does) have dozens, perhaps hundreds, of millionaire entrepreneurs offering support, turn-key package solutions, custom installation, maintenance, support, administration, and customisation. And that's just the primary impact, secondary impacts include wealth generated by trading firms, banks, shops, and other businesses who make use of free software and hire local talent to tailor solutions to their needs, or simply install and support third-party turn-key solutions (in addition to the wealth created by the savings in licensing fees, and the savings in businesses not finding themselves beholden to orphaned software, forced to upgrade against their own best interests by vendors pulling support, etc.).
The only ones who lose in a free software/open source economy vs. a proprietary, closed-source economy are the Bill Gates of the world. Even the cadre of programmers who think they'll lose out because the business approach of Apple, Microsoft, or Oracle is all they know are unlikely to lose out at all, provided they are willing to learn new products and adjust their assumptions about how software generates wealth, and how demand for their talents and skills fit into such an economy.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
So, he is arguing against a position that I've never heard anyone holding.
These members of the anti-copyright crowd cite the GPL (GNU Public License) as an alternative to copyright without any sense of the ironic fact that the GPL can't exist without copyright.
Starting with RMS himself, most people *either* say copyrigth is fine -- GPL is our prefered copyrigth-notice OR they say: copyrigth is fundamentally a bad idea, but aslong as we've got it, we've got no choice but to make the best of it, GPL is our attempt at this.
The biggest group I know are somewhere in between; They accept copyrigth, but consider life+100 years completely ridicolous. Copyrigths on software should probably expire in a decade. My prefered state of affairs would be no DMCA or similar law, 5 year copyrigth on software, and as much of that software as possible under the GPL. (yeah, this would mean you could take 6-year-old GPL-software and put it in a closed product. Fine with me !)
It's sorta like the MANY people who say that software-patents are BAD, but aslong as we do have them, it migth be worthwhile to gather up an Open Source defencive patent-pool.
Who *are* these people he argues against ? Do they even exist ?- Copyright term extensions have been extended by an order of magnitude from the 14-year term established by the Statute of Anne.
- In many industries, the standard of production is so high that it takes dozens of people to create a work. Therefore, most works in these industries fall under the "work made for hire" rule, where the publisher is deemed the author.
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. When I write a song, how can I tell whether I am the rightful author or I am unintentionally plagiarizing an existing copyrighted work? As seen in Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, 420 F. Supp. 177 (SDNY 1976), the damages for even unintentional infringement can be high enough to bankrupt an indie artist. "My Sweet Lord" on Wikipedia gives more background.