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.

Comments

In a world without copyright...

[c0l0]

...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.

Re:In a world without copyright...

[dircha]

"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.

Re:In a world without copyright...

[iminplaya]

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.

abolish copyright

[nefarity]

Who are these amazing people that want to abolish copyright?

Re:abolish copyright

[KutuluWare]

The author of TFA is seriously confused about a lot of things, one of those things being the goals of the Free Software Foundation. Stallman is probably one of the most extreme ultra-liberal people to ever sit at a keyboard, and yet I don't think he's ever once pushed for total abolition of copyright.

What RMS and ideologically similar people have proposed is this: software should not be covered under copyright law. You can see this ideal most clearly if you head over to http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html and read the two articles called "Why Software Should {Be Free,Not Have Owners}". While I disagree with his philosophy, he makes a pretty solid empirical case for why software should not be "owned" in the same sense that books are "owned" by their author or art is "owned" by the artist.

The author of the article also fails to pick up on a key point about the GPL and why it exists: because there is copyright law, the FSF must use copyright law to accomplish their goals. If software was suddenly declared ineligible for copyright, there'd be no need for the GPL because no proprietary software company could prevent people with access to their source code from modifying or redistributing it, nor could they prevent people from modifying or distributing binary copies of the software. This is a small step back from the current state where the group of people with access to the GPL'd source code includes everyone with a copy of the binary, but it's a giant leap forward in eliminating all the complex legal issues around who can copy what and where.



--K

Re:abolish copyright

[Dragonslicer]

The slashdot crowd certainly seems to be pretty strongly anti-patent.

I don't think most of the Slashdot crowd is anti-patent, just as they aren't anti-copyright. I think most of the Slashdot crowd just wants copyright and patents to be handled the way they were originally intended. Copyrights are supposed to expire after a specific, relatively short period of time, guaranteeing that the work would be incorporated into society as a whole, for society's benefit. I think you'll find a lot more people that want 25-year copyrights instead of 100-year copyrights than you'll find people that want no copyrights. Patents would probably get a similar response, with most people wanting 15-year patents on useful, non-obvious inventions, instead of the tons of patents on business methods and interface designs that we get now.

You can oppose copyright ... and support BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

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

An argument from thin air.

[reality-bytes]

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.

Ahh, straw men

[Z0mb1eman]

"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.

Of course he's in favor of copyrights ...

[WrongSizeGlass]

From his blog:

Brain Handles © 2007 All Rights Reserved. Looks like an objective opinion to me.

Another sophomoric Sunday blog post.

[Bruce Perens]

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

Re:Another sophomoric Sunday blog post.

[Bruce Perens]

Not all of us can make a living being open source gasbags, you know. If it weren't for software patents, I would be a poor man.

Prove it. I looked, and could not find any patents issued to "Anonymous Coward". :-)

And by the way, my employer makes Open Source software for Wall Street investment banking firms. I am, however, also paid by customers (usually also Wall Street investment banks, but sometimes other entities) who want me to teach or lecture.

Bruce

Duh!

[martin-boundary]

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.

The problem with copyright...

[mehgul]

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.

Re:The problem with copyright...

[Dirtside]

In this case you're wrong; anything published before 1923 is now in the public domain, regardless of when the author died. Source: Cornell

exactly - straw man argument

[Baldur_of_Asgard]

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.

GPL != Open source

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Yes, GPL does use copyright law to do its heavy lifting, and the removal of copyright would break GPL. For anti-copyright/pro-GPL people this is not necessarily inconsistent as it is somewhat like legal Jujitsu - using the enemies strength to defeat themselves.

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.

-1 flamebait for the submission

[Vasco Bardo]

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.
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- 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.

*puff*

RTFM

[dircha]

Looks like another college sophomore just discovered the GPL.

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-fr eedom.html

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!

Causality problem

[kocsonya]

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?

[Peaker]

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.