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You Can Oppose Copyright and Support Open Source
kfogel writes "I'm submitting 'Supporting Open Source While Opposing Copyright' as a response to Greg Bulmash's piece from yesterday. I think there were a number of flaws and mistaken assumptions in Bulmash's reasoning, and I've tried to address them in this rebuttal, which has undergone review from some colleagues in the copyright-reform community."
Have fun, y'all.
What?
You can support BSD without supporting copyright, as it doesn't take advantage of many copyright protections. You can't support GPL without supporting copyright, as it would be unenforceable without copyright.
Abolishing copyright abolishes the ability to enforce GPL. End of story. Even though the orignial article is flawed, the fact still remains. You can't control distribultion using the GPL without copyright law.
"I'm submitting 'Supporting Open Source While Opposing Copyright' as a response to Greg Bulmash's piece from yesterday.
Then why not make the title of this article: "Supporting Open Source While Opposing Copyright", instead of repeating the same title from the previous article?
People who just scan titles, esp on RSS, are going to think this is a dupe.
Richard Stallman puts it so much better. I disagree with a lot of what Stallman says, but the man has thought about his message and tries not to waste words. I respect that.
I tire of the "here are 10-15 different arguments on my side, if any of them sticks then I win" style of debate.
So basically it seems like this guy doesn't want to do away with copyright, he just wants to change it so that any non-GPL-style license is prohibited.
The previous article suggested libertarian style freedom (free as in free to shoot your neighbor if he steps on your land), while this guy suggests communist style freedom (free as in "show your papers to get in line for free bread comrade").
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
It's a little pointless arguing what copyleft would be like in a world without copyright, because we're never going to live in a world without copyright.
Let's focus on what we might really be able to achieve:
Find free books.
Both of you miss the obvious.
Bulmash misses the point that without copyright, I can find the appropriate place in your machine code to insert my functions and then distribute the modified versions to my friends. That's 90% of the GPL right there... And the right redistribute everything is probably more valuable than being able to see your sloppy undocumented source code anyway.
Kfogel misses the point that without copyright the computer industry would have grown an entirely different direction from way back in the '70s. Without specific protection for the software component, companies would have tied software to the hardware. Think: dedicated Pac Man machines in the arcades. You can copy the Microsoft Office ROMS all you want, but it uses the registers and I/O devices only present on the patented Microsoft Office machine. No *general purpose* computers... Copyright is what made the general purpose computer sociologically possible. That world, by the way, would suck.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
You can support copyright and NOT support ABUSE of copyright. Its the ABUSE of copyright that pisses people off.
As a professional photographer, if I take a good photograph, I don't want someone putting my picture up on their website and saying someone else took the photo. This is NOT me abusing my copyright.
If, however, a newspaper ran my photo on the front page, but I refused to allow anyone to cut out the photo and hang it on their refrigerator, and went from house to house inspecting refrigerators... THAT would be abusing my copyright. Sound vaguely similar to the MAFIAAs?
I hope you see the difference. Copyright is actually a good thing when not abused.
The difference between BSDL and GPL is that GPL forces other (linked) code into the open. You need some sort of property rights (ie copyright) to stake a claim on your code and assert this bargaining power. With no copyright you would not have rights and thus not have the bargaining power and GPL would be dead.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"I'm submitting 'Girls Are The Ones' as a response to my sister's piece, 'Boys Have Cooties,' from yesterday. I think there were a number of flaws and mistaken assumptions in my sister's reasoning, and I've tried to address them in this rebuttal, which has undergone review from some colleagues in the 'Girls Have Cooties' community."
While easier to get reviewed by people who already broadly support your viewpoint, review tends to gain its power when those idealogically opposed to you review it and still can't find flaws in it.
As with a lot of "there is no such thing as property" groups, QuestionCopyright.org* seems to not understand the purpose of copyright. Copyright is a legal construct created to encourage authors and other creative types to make their works public (e.g., published, performed, broadcast, etc.) by letting them retain legal control of the work. The import point is the person who creates the work gets to control its use.
People are motivated to create such works for any number of reasons. Some want the money that comes from charging for copies or viewing a performance, others just want credit. In any case, copyright is what lets the author determine who can access his or her works and under what terms. If we, as a society, don't give authors this control, there is a reasonable likelihood that a number of people who would otherwise create such a work will not because they don't want to see the fruits of their labor taken advantage of by others in ways they don't approve.
This brings us to open source software (OSS) and copyright. Some people license their work under a BSD license, some people put their work into the public domain, some license their work under the GPL and there are a number of other possible licenses. That there are a number of different OSS licenses and developers freely choose which license to release their project under means that the developers are making a conscious choice as to what kinds of restrictions they want on what they have created. This brings us to the GPL and similar licenses.
The GPL isn't just about attribution. People who just want attribution publish under a BSD license or something similar. The GPL is about creating a body of free software that stays free. As a number of court cases have demonstrated, there are all too many people out there who are more than willing to abscond with GPLed source for their proprietary products. Copyright law is what gives the GPL teeth to prevent this.
You can have free software without copyrights but it's going to be "free as in beer" software. Unfortunately, just like with beer, when the beer runs out, it doesn't matter if it's free. You still can't have any. If people aren't willing to develop without some level of control of the work after it's released, there won't be much free software. Copyright and the GPL means that at least some software will be "free as in speech" and, chances are, developers who continue to contribute to what they see is a greater good.
I guess I should rephrase what I said and say that you can have free software without copyrights but just not for very long. Lots of developers won't put up with having their work taken advantage of and will simply no longer create. Thus, the argument comes back to where I started, protection of an author's work is what incentivizes an author to create. Even if that incentive is just recognition by the developer community and knowledge that what they have created will stay free.
Cheers,
Dave
* I will give them a point for at least being philosophically consistent. Once you grant anyone the right to restrict the use of a creative work then it becomes difficult to draw a line as to when a restriction is benign or even beneficial (e.g., the GPL) and when it's not (please remit $0.25 (aka, two bits) to me for enjoying the above discourse).
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
First of all, I support the GPL. I think that the concept of community supported software is great. I also like how someone can make modifications to code and be obligated to give back to the community.
Having said that, I think people who preach that we should abolish copyright are basically lazy and cheap. Oh sure they will serve us some leftist bullshit to legitimize their position, and they will throw some "Well it's not stealing because even after giving a copy of some software to a friend, the original owner still has the use of said software - NO HARM, NO FOUL!"
Of course this is Slashdot and I will get some hostile replies, but face it people who preach that we should abolish copyright are proclaiming that GPL doesn't work. They are frustrated that they don't have the time or money to make a commercial quality software, so they just want to be able to legally steal it. Basically these people rather spend their time trying to accomplish something that will never happen, rather than putting effort in a legitimate movement like GPL.
It all boils down to this. If you believe software should be free, then nothing is preventing you from using GPL license software. Hell, if you really believe software should be free, then create a GPL program. If you can't code and you can't find the software that you need, then I guess you'll have to spend money. Sponsor someone to write your GPL program, or just break down and purchase a legitimate licensed copy.
But if you just plain pirate all your software, then your just a leech and offer nothing to support your cause.
What we should be concentrating on is abolishing software patents...
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
The author is playing with words. At the end of the day a viral license like the GPL cannot exist without laws that acknowledge the "specialness" of intellectual property. You can't GPL a hammer.
.. yadda yadda..). The former doesn't need any copyright law, the latter certainly does. I think "copyright abolitionists" are trying to have it both ways here. The author certainly looks like a guy who is trying to reconcile something like the GPL (which I'm sure is perceived as a very good thing in the circles he hangs out) with his ideological beliefs about copyright. At the end of it all, it comes off as a clumsy argument.
>Imagine if we had laws that did away with most prohibitions against sharing, but that enforced crediting and permitted authors to enforce GPL-like provisions requiring sharing.
Considering that copyright law has no prohibition against sharing (after all, releasing your work as creative commons is as simple as cut-pasting a line of text) and thanks to GPL and similar licenses, copyright can have provisions to enforce sharing - I think I can imagine a world such as this - we live in it. What the author is arguing is that every work should be released with a mandatory GPL-like or maybe Creative Commons-type license.
>Thus, to say that the GPL depends on copyright is like saying that reading depends on scribes.
No.. the GPL is a license tested in court and found wholly within the realm of current copyright law.
>The basic argument of copyright abolitionists is that people should be free to share when sharing does not result in any diminution of supply.
I understand that argument even though I don't agree with it, but there's another point here. Is "free to share" the same as "forced to share"? After all, people are free to share MIT licensed code, but are forced to share GPL licensed code (provided that they made changes to it and distributed the binary
Every law is about forcing people and every law except those concerning violence, global destruction/environment damage or close personal possessions is optional and should only be passed if it benefits most people. If I am forced to accept copyright, the copyright owner should have some obligations in return.
Copyright law under pins all legal protection over the rights on a piece of work. By attaching Copyright to a piece of work you are also staking a claim to ownership to be able to then license the use of the work from that legal vantage point.
The concept of "Public Domain" only exists from the vantage point of the original Copyright holder accepting continued legal liability for any future plagerism claim that may occur in relation to that piece of work (by puting their name to it); but then explicitly granting a free for all license on its distribution and use. There is no such entity as an "anonymous Public Domain" piece of work, since if no one stakes their claim to ownership then its legally possible for anyone to make that claim (as Mr Anonymous won't be able to defend himself in a court of law).
Why is "Copyright law" a bad thing for society, it seems a very passive law that grants the creator rights over ownership of a piece of work. From that legal vantage point the Copyright holder may do anything / license anyway they choose, being the "Copyright holder" they are granted that power by law. It makes no sense for any creator of work not to involve themselves in this process, since its costs them nothing and grants them everything.
I oppose discussions of copyright and open source period.
Copyrights are a good idea when applied in moderation.
Open source is a means to an end, not an end unto it self.
Neither are particularly interesting to read about on Slashdot because both issues are plagued with juvenile whining by 35 year old virgins who still live with their parents.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
You'd end up essentially saying "You are obliged to both freely distribute this code and keep it secret" which seems a bit of a challenge. Frankly I think your idea is broken.
It is only copyright law that allows us to publish the code and defines the terms of use at a level that suites the copyright holder. This allows us to have various licenses.
Without copyright the writer has no rights and there are only two levels: secret (proprietary) and published (BSDL-like use as you wish).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Without *some* kind of copyright protection, there would be no financial incentive to create content, and we'd be subjected to a whole world of reality TV and groupsourced "literature" and wikipedias - or all premium content would be "members only" and something like copyright would be enforced on a case-by-case basis with individual contracts that would have even worse terms than existing copyright laws. The problem is that copyright has been perverted into a dead hand; we need to reform the terms of copyright, not eliminate it. We also need to reform patents.
You really didn't read the article, did you. You read it up until the point where you confirmed the position you thought it was taking, and then assumed the rest to be bollocks or whatever.
THE POINT was that the GPL would need to be changed if copyright laws were changed. The spirit of the GPL (Cohesion and Continuity, per the article) would be enforced by other clauses that would be created in light of whatever law takes the place of copyright, again per the article, "... be enforced using laws so drastically different from our laws today as to be unrecognizeable".
His position is that we can't just get rid of copyright, but we would have to replace it with something more modern. Something 21st century. Something that can be used to prove right of authorship and prevent plagaristic forms of derivative works, without limiting scope of distribution by the public, by default.
And the GPL would have to evolve to fit in that environment.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
"The abolitionists are perfectly aware of what copyright law *is* today, they're just trying to change that."
Bullshit. I'm a professional writer - part of my job requires me to have a working understanding of the law and what it does. My academic training is primarily that of a historian - and that gives me some insight as to how societies develop. And, frankly, I read your article very carefully (both of them, in fact), and you failed to understand copyright law on the reading comprehension level. I'm not surprised that you haven't thought through it. And, frankly, denying that it's there when somebody has simply summarized the letter of the law is one hell of an ostrich impression. You're the one who should be discussing whether it "should be there." Arguing that it isn't there when it's protected under the US Constitution from the get-go, has a history of case law, is recognized by international treaty, and has several other pieces of legislation that have passed in every western country in the world, is just embarrassingly stupid.
I've been reading Slashdot now for a couple of years, and I've seen lots of misconceptions from the copyright abolitionists - so you're not alone. These aren't arguments against the law, or against the theory of the law - and most of these are failures on the reading comprehension level. Here are a few of the more interesting ones, and they're all bullshit:
1. That having something under copyright keeps it away from society.
This one I find rather funny - there are abolitionists out there who really think that authors sit around creating work under copyright, and then cackle as they put them in a box and never let anybody see them. If you're a pro writer, it's publish or perish.
Sometimes, they expand this to mean that something can go out of print and then is harder to get your hands on, but what they keep missing is that this has to do with book sales, not with whether the book is under copyright or public domain. In most, if not all cases, royalties to an author make up very little of the total cost of printing the book. Contacting the author or his/her estate tends to be easy - the recluse author that nobody can contact is pretty much an urban legend at this point. The fact is that when a work enters the public domain, whether it gets printed is dictated by whether it will be profitable to print it, and that is dictated by how well it has stood the test of time. So, life of the author + 50 years in the here and now has very little impact on availability of a work.
(And, don't get me started on fair use, which is guaranteed under copyright law.)
2. That you can copyright an idea.
The sad thing is that while the first one at least is a take on a speculative issue (and, I will concede, possibly not a failure on the reading comprehension level), this one is disproven just by reading the SUMMARY of the law. You cannot copyright an idea (it's PATENT law that allows you to lay claim to an idea). For that matter, in the entire three hundred year history of copyright law, you have never been able to copyright an idea. So anybody who thinks this has obviously never read the law, or failed to understand it on the reading comprehension level.
3. That copyright is more artificial than any other right.
This one requires people to have little or no concept of history. Or current events. The people who claim that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are natural rights seem to be missing the fact that at least half of the world's population lives in places without those rights. They're also missing the fact that the US Constitution was a remarkable document because it DID enshrine those rights in the highest law of the land, making them inalienable in the United States - and that hadn't happened anywhere in the Western world before the American Revolution.
To make things even more ridiculous, the concept of a work of literature as a property protected under law pre-dates the US Constitution by arou
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive