That would not be a valid contract. A fundamental principle of contract law is that in order for a contract to be valid, each side must receive consideration, something of value.
For example, if you were to sign a contract that says that you will give your car to me, in exchange for nothing, that contract would be unenforcable. If you sign a contract that says that you will give your car to me, in exchange for one dollar, that contract would be enforcable, because each of us received consideration.
That's why you often hear of someone leasing a piece of land for $1.00. Consideration is a requirement for a legal contract.
In this case, you have already paid for the book, and are the owner of the copy. A shrink-wrap contract on a book would not be valid because in exchange for giving up your right to resell the book, you would receive nothing of value.
You would receive nothing of value because you don't need a license to read a book, or to resell it. You already have that right under copyright law.
Why is this different than software?
With software, the software industry has convinced the courts that when you load the software into your computer is actually making a copy of the software. Making copies is an exclusive right of the copyright holder.
Hence, goes the logic, a shrinkwrap license is a legal contract, because in exchange for agreeing to the restrictive terms of the license, you receive the limited right -- that you would not otherwise have -- to make a copy of the software -- specifically, onto the hard drive and/or into the memory of your computer.
This is the legal logic behind software shrinkwrap licenses.
But for a book, there would be no consideration on the part of the publisher, because the publisher has no right to prevent you from reading or selling the book. You receive those rights when you pay for the book. No license required.
The problem here is one the publishers have created for themselves: They sell the book outright rather than license it with conditions on resale. It would be easy for book publishers to offer their wares as licensed content, just as software is currently distributed.
No it wouldn't. The only reason that software is sold as "licensed content" is because the software companies convinced the judiciary that because installing and using a piece of software requires that the software be copied into a computer's memory, the act of running software is equivalent to the act of making a new copy of that software, which requires the permission of the copyright owner. Therefore, the logic goes, the purchaser of a piece of software can be forced to accept "license terms" which grant the purchaser the right to make copies of the software -- into the computer memory -- in exchange for giving up your rights to reverse engineer the software, transfer the software, etc, etc.
A restrictive "license agreement" is NOT an option generally available to copyright holders to dictate the terms of use of their works. It's an exceptional case that only applies to the software industry.
When you read a book, you are not making a copy of that book. Therefore, even if a publisher tried to include a "license agreement" with their book, it would have no legal standing. As the owner of a legally made copy of a copyrighted work, you have certain rights, under federal law, including:
17 USC 109. Limitations on exclusive rights: Effect of transfer of particular copy or phonorecord
(a) Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106(3), the owner of a particular copy or phonorecord lawfully made under this title, or any person authorized by such owner, is entitled, without the authority of the copyright owner, to sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy or phonorecord.
This right is not optional. It isn't something that can be erased by a "license agreement" by the book publisher. When you purchase a book, and read it, you are in no way making a copy, so you do not require a license. If there happens to be a shrink-wrap license on the book, you can just tear it up and throw it away, because reading the book is a right that you acquired when you purchased the book, as defined by federal law, not part of an agreement between you and the publisher. By not accepting the shrink wrap, you accept the standard "contract."
The standard "contract" under which books are sold to the general public is copyright law, and is fully described by Title 17. Under copyright law, you have legal rights. If you read it through, you'll understand why what you are suggesting is not a legal option for publishers. The key parts are in Section 101, paragraphs 106 and 109.
Publishers of books have absolutely no legal right to impose any sort of "license" on you that would restrict your right to resell a book.
If publishers of books were allowed to impose licensing agreements on books, that would be an elimination of your legal right to resell your books.
Either your right to resell your books comes from copyright law (which it does), or it comes at the whim of publishers (which it doesn't). If you transfer the right to control resale of books from the owners of those books to the copyright holder, then you have eliminated the legal right of owners to resell used books.
The only reason why software licenses are even considered to perhaps have any legal standing is because the software companies have convinced the legal system that the act of installing or running a computer program involves the "making of a copy" of that program, which is an exclusive right of the copyright holder. Hence, even if you buy and own a disc of computer software, the argument goes, you don't have the right to install it or use it without the permission of the copyright holder, and that consent is given in the form of the shrink-wrap license.
Regardless of what you think about software licenses, there is no "making of a copy" when you read a book, so ordinary copyright law applies to the book, which gives the owner of the copy the full rights to resell the book without the consent or permission of the author, publisher, and/or copyright holder.
Any such "licensing agreement" on books would be legally unenforcable. A "licensing agreement" is not an option generally available to copyright holders. Licensing agreements on software are an artifact of a judicial misunderstanding about the nature of computer software -- a legal error that needs to be corrected, not expanded into the rest of copyright law.
One of the hot topics on the various projectionists and film collectors forums is digital projection -- and how much resolution is enough.
There are at least two limiting factors.
The first is the size of the film grain. Once you reach a certain resolution, any further increase in resolution goes towards clarifying the individual film grains instead of contributing more picture information. This starts to happen at around a 4K vertical resolution.
The second is the resolution of the human vision system. Again, there isn't much point in having higher resolution than the resolution of the cones in your eye. Again, your visual resolution is approximately reached at 4K resolution over a 60 degree field.
Another advantages of these digital micro-mirror based interference systems is that they can handle tremendous amounts of light, much more than can be passed through motion picture film without melting it.
I'm not surprised that display technology has tended to stagnate -- in order to effectively utilize high resolution (6Kx4K or so) technology, you need to be able to move data fast enough to keep the video pipeline full. I'll bet that in five years, tube monitors and televisions will go the way of tube radios.
All that Thomson is doing is laying the groundwork for the abandonment of perceptual encoding. With network speeds improving and storage prices falling, lossless compression schemes like Shorten will inevitably replace lossy compression schemes like jpg and ogg.
Shorten achieves 2:1 lossless compression on audio files. MP3 offers 10:1 lossy compression. Already people are distributing lossless audio files as.shn files.
If Thomson succeeds in creating a legal cloud around any and all perceptual encoding schemes, this may be the "push" required for the industry to completely abandon lossy compression in favor of unpatented, lossless 2:1 compression.
A year or two down the road, if someone surfaces with a patent on Shorten's 2:1 lossless compression, the net will undoubtedly be able to easily handle uncompressed 1:1 lossless audio.
In short, MP3s are near obsolete, and nothing will force them into the dustbin of history faster than the fear of lawsuits.
On a processor, you have facilities like general registers, that the emulated operating system is supposed to use, and that will be saved and restored by the control program when you switch contexts.
You also have certain special registers and facilities, like control registers, and segment registers. The actual contents of these registers are going to always remain under the control of the supervisor. Part of the job of a virtualization supervisor is to emulate the function of these registers, and also to reflect their virtual state to the virtualized operating system when requested.
So basically, in order for the architecture to be virtualizable, all of the instructions that expose the presence of the emulator must be privileged.
This includes things like control registers, status words, I/O instructions, etc. If you're going to "fake out" an operating system into believing that it is running on bare iron, you need to be able to generate an exception whenever the operating system attempts to execute an instruction that exposes the fact that the actual state of the processor is different from the state of the virtual machine.
For instance, one of the mistakes in the IBM System/370 architecture was that the instruction for accessing the hardware time-of-day clock (STCK -- STore ClocK) was a non-privileged instruction. As a consequence, it was impossible to set a different time of day for a virtual machine -- the supervisor couldn't trap the instruction.
Some architectures (I believe that this is one of the X86 sticking points) require privileged state in order to modify certain control registers, but provide non-privileged instructions for accessing the contents of those registers.
For non-virtualizing operating systems, this makes sense. By making the instructions to examine the system state non-privileged, you both simplify the job of writing the operating system (because you don't have to emulate those instructions), and you also receive a performance boost (because executing those instructions don't result in exceptions). The tradeoff comes when you try and implement a virtual machine environment, and find that you can't, because even in protected mode, a program can find out "too much" about the actual state of the processor.
And you think Linux/StarOffice is the answer? All that would result in is the users bringing Win95 CD's from home to get their computers to a point where they found them useful again.
Ok. Here's a solution. Institute a policy. Install Microsoft Windows or any Microsoft software, and you're fired.
IT has to talk to it's users, they have to listen to their users, they have to provide solutions taht the users want!
There are many companies that still to this day use dumb ASCII terminals for a very simple reason. You can't waste time on them. The only thing you can do with an ASCII terminal is job functions. There's no minesweeper, no cute software to download and install. No viruses. No porn.
What makes you think the FBI can be trusted? Was it something I said?
The point is, Carnivore was advertised as a way of specifically wiretapping email. This is very different from deliberately writing code to capture passwords.
Yes, you are absolutely right. email packets are no different than RADIUS packets. The point is that the FBI is saying, "Trust us, we won't look at anything that we aren't allowed to look at", yet the document clearly shows that password-stealing capabilities were not only built into the program, but worked "as expected."
This just shows that they have been lying about the capabilities and purpose of their software.
This is alarming because it has nothing to do with capturing email.
RADIUS stands for "Remote Access DIal Up Service", and is a login password authentication protocol. If Carnivore is designed to capture RADIUS packets, then it is a password-stealing program, not an email collection program.
I had never heard that Carnivore was designed to steal passwords. I heard that it was designed to collect email. Apparently the censors didn't realize that they left in evidence of a completely different purpose for Carnivore than was represented to the public, or was I misinformed?
Couple this with the HDTV video card talked about recently in slashdot.
That HDTV card can stream MPEG-2 video to disk at the rate of 7.7 GB/Hour
So one of these disks would hold over 18 hours of HDTV-grade video. VHS, goodbye!
Re:Correcting the failure of software copyright
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In all of those examples, they learned the external characteristics of a desktop environment, image editor, and browsers by examining the running software. But they learned how to create source code that implements those characteristics elsewhere.
Re:Correcting the failure of software copyright
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Thanks for your comments. I also came from a mainframe background, and was a member of SHARE for many years. I did a lot of work locally modifying the VM & CMS nuclei, and I agree that the same sense of excitement and empowerment existed within the programmers who had access to IBM's licensed source code.
However, IBM stabbed its users in the back when it went Object Code Only on VM. Even though they eventually reversed themselves, and started re-releasing the source code (or at least the output of the PL/X compilation), a lot of damage had been done. There was a turning point when a lot of people realized that having source code available at the whim of a corporation was simply not acceptable. I promote Linux at my workplace because I don't ever want that to happen again. We lost a lot. We had to withdraw popular features from our system because we simply couldn't support them anymore without access to the source code. The axe fell earlier this year, and just a few months ago, a salvage team came in, cut up our three-processor 3090 and had it hauled away for scrap. It's a shame, because VM has some great features that never made it to unix -- CMS pipelines for one.
The difference here is that groups like SHARE were only for IBM customers. You had physical access to the source code, and IBM's implied consent to share your modifications with other IBM customers, but it was all under the control of IBM. The breakthrough of the GPL was in creating a structure where the source code cannot be "recalled" if the "strategic direction" of the company that licensed the source code changes along with the management.
So yes, there have always been small user communities clustered around licensed source code, but this is different because the community is the general public, and the license to use, modify, and redistribute the software is permanent.
Correcting the failure of software copyright
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I've said this before. Free software, and to a lesser extent, Open Source software, correct a glaring defect in copyright law with respect to software -- it fails to establish a public domain.
Not public domain in the sense of "expired copyright", but public domain in the sense that copyright is supposed to place examples of the art into the public for study and learning. Copyright is supposed to promote disclosure. Publication of object code is not disclosure. It is non-disclosure. Software copyright is a failure in that it grants a monopoly on object code without the required disclosure of the corresponding source code.
Over 99% of the people who purchase a novel will do nothing more with it then use it for entertainment purposes. However, the remaining tiny percent of the purchasers are the next generation's authors. They will read the novel, and from it, learn the art of writing new novels.
Software doesn't work that way. No amount of study of Windows 98 will teach you how to write an operating system. That's because Windows 98 doesn't come with source code. You can use it, but you aren't allowed to understand it. This is no accident. It is the express desire of Microsoft that, in spite of their receiving the benefits of a copyright monopoly, that no one be allowed to read (the technical term for reading object code is "reverse engineering") their copyrighted work. Says so right in their license. Says so, with very few exceptions, in every single license of every single piece of proprietary software on the market.
Imagine if a young student expressed interest in becoming an author, and was told: Ok, but you will have to learn how to write from scratch. There are no examples for you to learn from. You cannot read pre-existing novels. You will have to learn plot development, character development, plot twists, all from scratch -- from textbooks. You must make absolutely sure that you never, ever read someone else's novel, because that would "contaminate" you, and you could never legally write a novel, because you could be sued by the people whose novels you had read.
I don't think that the result would be a "progress" in the art of writing novels. Why should we think that by making every potential software developer "start from scratch" leads to better software?
Now substitute "software" for "novels", and "reverse engineer" for "read", and you will get a statement that most legal departments of software companies would quickly agree with.
No wonder Free software and Open Source software are considered akin to a revolution. For the first time in the history of software the doors are thrown open. People are finally allowed, and encouraged to understand software instead of just use it. The fact that over 99% of the people who use Free and Open Source software will never modify it is irrelevant. What is important is that the tiny fraction of young people who are curious and want to learn how software works so that they can write their own, finally have the opportunity to examine and play with full fledged, working, professional quality software. And in the case of Free software, they have the right to reuse and redistribute their own work -- the modified code.
Free and Open Source software are revolutionary because they transcend the political limits of copyright law, and create what copyright law should have created, but failed to. A way "To promote the progress of science and useful arts."
Yeah, and deadheads report those stores to the Dead's lawyers, who show up with law enforcement officer, confiscate all their infringing merchandise, and open a can of legal whoop-ass on the store. There's "hippy stores" that no longer exist because they tried to leech off the Dead by selling bootlegs.
Why would Deadheads want to go out of their way to deliberately hurt record stores that sell bootlegs, and get bootlegs taken off the shelf and off of ebay?
Consider this statement from Grateful Dead Merchandising, released 01/2000:
The Grateful Dead and our managing organizations have long encouraged the purely non-commercial exchange of music taped at our concerts and those of our individual members. That a new medium of distribution has arisen - digital audio files being traded over the Internet - does not change our policy in this regard.
Our stipulations regarding digital distribution are merely extensions of those long-standing principles and they are as follow:
No commercial gain may be sought by websites offering digital files of our music, whether through advertising, exploiting databases compiled from their traffic, or any other means. All participants in such digital exchange acknowledge and respect the Copyrights of the performers, writers and publishers of the music.
This notice should be clearly posted on all sites engaged in this activity.
We reserve the ability to withdraw our sanction of non-commercial digital music should circumstances arise that compromise our ability to protect and steward the integrity of our work.
As well they should. The Dead have allowed audience taping and tape tradring as a courtesy to their fans, with the only condition being that the music be not sold for profit. Their fans respect this, and have little tolerance or respect for those who don't.
Mrrrp! Wrong- they take it for free. Since you have to give away copies of your binaries for them to work, you sell one copy- then the whole world takes it for free (legally). How can you sell copies?
You customize each binary so that it only works on that user's machine or is tied to a non-reproducable physical device, like a dongle, or has a "license key." I deal with this sort of "hassleware" all the time on unix systems. It's a big pain in the butt when you migrate to a new CPU, with a new CPUid.
You can distribute as many copies of this sort of software as you want, but those copies won't work without a key. Heck, whenever we buy an AIX server, it comes with a raft of CDs full of software that doesn't work, because we haven't purchased a license key for it.
Sure, people can "hack out" these sorts of access control mechanisms, but remember, unlike entertainment software like DVDs, computer software has a short shelf life. The copy protection on version 1.3 of some application only really has to work until version 1.4 is released.
Perhaps you have gotten the idea that people like to pay for things needlessly. If so I'd have a business where I resold air in invisible containers for high prices.
Of course not. They only do so when they have no choice. Removing copyright protection would give people the right to use software without paying for it, and the only possible response from the computer industry, besides going out of business, would be to attempt to remove the ability to use software without paying for it. The only way to remove the ability to freely use software is to conceal the operation of the software -- to not release source code.
Heh- who are your customers in a copyrightless world?
Non-programmers who need and want software. Just like today.
they would probably demand the source code since the only way they would hire you to make something for them would be a one-time commission
I would refuse to provide them with the source code. So would all my competitors. Now what do they do?
Answer: They buy my object code, or my competitor's object code, or go without.
The "upgrade & bug fix scam" has nothing to do with copyright. It has everything to do with access to the underlying source code. If you don't have access to the source code, you can't realistically modify or understand a program.
Without copyright, releasing the source code is giving away the store, which is why very few people would release uncopyrighted source code. The GPL is a way of distributing source code without necessarily giving away the store.
Copyright protects source code just as copyright protects the contents of a novel. People publish novels largely because of the legal (not technological) protection of copyright. GPL'ed software is no different. The difference is that with software you have a choice -- you can publish source code, or object code.
There should be a copyright incentive to publish source code. My point is that the GPL provides an incentive that is lacking in copyright law.
when there is no copyright there is no incentive to hide the source code except in situations such as Gov't secrets.
I couldn't disagree more.
If I write a computer program and distribute it as object-code-only, my customers are forced to come to me for upgrades and bug fixes.
Plus, if I customize the computer program for each customer, then only that customer can effectively make use of the program. If I am writing an application to manage a bookstore, I might hard-code in certain categories, such as books, magazines, etc that make the application useless for managing a toy store. I might hard-code in information to make the program worthless to anyone else -- such as a provision to print out the store's name, address and phone number on the top of each page that gets printed by the software.
I might include calls to a dongle-checking routine, to make sure that no one can use the software except for the person who paid for it.
Even with the legal protection of copyright, there are enormous incentives to hide the source code to software. Those incentives do not disappear if copyright disappears. They only become more acute.
Right now there is no incentive to reveal source code besides the incentives offered by the GPL:
1) You can incorporate other GPL source code and save development time.
2) Your code may, if you're lucky, be subjected to an external audit, and you may receive feedback in the form of bug reports and/or enhancements.
So, the mandatory disclosure of source is simply an artifact of defeating copyright law- not an intrinsic of freedom.
Disclosure of source code does not defeat copyright law. A program has no more or less legal protection if it is released as source code or as object code only.
Disclosure of source code defeats efforts to commit fraud and invasion of privacy. Over and over again, we find that software companies simply cannot resist the urge to secretly collect personal information, and lie about it. You might assume, without knowing better, that you can write an anonymous document using Microsoft Word. Then you find out that Microsoft has arranged for the serial number of your computer to be concealed in every document you write. You are told by Digital Convergance that that nifty little cuecat only reports statistical information about what you scan, but then you discover that it also secretly sends a serial number. How do you know that your Windows 98 software doesn't have back doors to allow Microsoft to tap into your machine? You don't. You simply have to trust Microsoft.
What is freedom if not the ability to protect your own interests? How can you protect your own interests when you are forced to, in effect, wear blindfolds so you can't see what's going on. That's what you do when you use object-code-only software. You are trusting a corporation to safeguard your privacy and interests in the face of overwhelming evidence that these are not the interests of corporations that sell software.
Source code disclosure creates confidence that a program operates as represented. Without source code verification, your privacy and freedom are unprotected.
So yes, I believe that source code is intrinsic to freedom. The fact that very little software is released in source code form has had the result that most software users enjoy very little freedom over their own products. Look in the End User Licenses of all your proprietary software. Where are your rights? What do you actually own? Answer: You don't have any rights, and you don't actually own any of your software. How can freedom exist without rights?
I'm sure RMS would actually prefer a world where there were no copyrights or patents of any sort. The community is about sharing - not about preserving the copyright fallacy. And a totally uninhibited world would have the same net effect as a totally GPL one.
Without copyright, the redistribution provisions of the GPL would be unnecessary. But that's only half of the GPL.
If only software interpreters existed, and if software could only be run by executing the original, human-readable source code, then the source-code disclosure provisions of the GPL would be unnecessary. However, we live in a world of compilers and access-protection schemes. Without copyright, the source-code disclosure provisions of the GPL would be unenforcable. This would destroy a key public benefit of the GPL -- the mandatory disclosure of source code.
Don't forget what the author of the GPL says about copyright: that free software would be much easier to produce and use without it. The GPL does indeed utilize copyright, but the GPL is made necessary by copyright in the first place. Without copyright, the GPL could not exist -- but it would not need to exist. So, personally, I'm with RMS: LEAVE IT.
The GPL is not made necessary by copyright. The GPL is made necessary by the failure of copyright.
Compare computer software to, for instance, a printed novel. There is no such thing as a "closed-source" paperback novel. When you purchase a Stephen King book from the bookstore, you acquire a copy of the work in its most complete, useful form. Granted, >99% of the people who buy the book will put it to no other use then to obtain personal pleasure by reading the book. However, the remaining 1% are extremely important. To a budding author, a novel is a real-life lesson in how to write fiction. To a social critic, a novel is a source of ideas; of quotes; something to criticize and analyze. To a historian, a novel is a snapshot of current events, mores; a source of history. These are the people who advance the progress -- by building new works on the foundation of previous works. That fraction of 1% of a novel's readers will become the writers of the future, and copyright is properly functioning by protecting their right to learn.
However, when you buy a software package, you acquire a copy in a obfuscated, concealed form -- precompiled. You don't know what has been compiled into the program. All you know is that the program is represented to be, say a word processor for instance.
This state of affairs is perfectly acceptable to 99% of the population. Most people will buy, for instance, a copy of Microsoft Word, because they want to use it, not study it.
However, that leaves a critical 1% of the population who are completely unrepresented and abandoned by software copyright law. It is generally against the "license" of a piece of software -- and with the DMCA it is now a felony in certain cases -- for that 1% to attempt to read the program (also known as reverse engineering); to attempt to discover the details of what the program really does and how it actually works. To learn from it.
To a budding programmer, a copy of Windows 98 is useless. It will not teach her how to program a computer. To a computer scientist or researcher, it is worthless. A copy of Windows 98 is not a suitable subject for study. Studying Windows 98 does not teach one about operating system concepts. You can not experiment with Windows 98 by, for instance, replacing or modifying the scheduling algorithm.
The effect of this is obvious. With few exceptions, we are a world of computer users, not computer programmers. Copyright law on software has led to a world of technological illiterates. A person may have the world's most state of the art software sitting in front of them, yet they are forbidden by both the license and by federal law from reading that software to understand how it works. Imagine if writers of fiction were forbidden to read other people's works. If they had to re-invent the ideas of story development, character development, plot twists, all from scratch. That's roughly the situation that budding computer programmers find themselves in. Unless they abandon useless proprietary software packages and base their self-education -- and their own original software -- on the study of GPL'ed programs instead.
How could copyright law on computer software be fixed so as not to promote illiteracy?
The solution is not to eliminate copyright on computer software.
Closed-source software would be just as useless without copyright. A compiled binary is a compiled binary. Removing the copyright restrictions on Windows 98 would not make Windows 98 useful to programmers in the sense that reading a good novel is useful to a young author. Even if copyright were to be removed from software, the only way that a closed-source application could be made useful would be the long, laborious process of reverse engineering -- the reconstruction of the source code. Even then, it would only be an approximation of the original work. Besides, the elimination of copyright on software would only encourage the proliferation of "copy protection" schemes, which benefit no one.
So why not change copyright law structurally?
There is absolutely no constitutional reason not to make source code disclosure a prerequisite for copyright on computer software. The only reasons are political -- software companies want the benefits of copyright, and at the same time the benefits of trade secrets.
The discussion shouldn't be "GPL vs Copyright", or "Copyright -- love it or leave it." Here's the question. There are a small percentage -- less than 1% of the population -- working outside of the "corporate software writing" establishment -- who are able and willing to advance the progress of computer science by reading and understanding source code, and creating new works. Are they better served by the traditional copyright framework, or by the GPL-modified copyright framework? From this vantage point, they seem to be choosing the GPL.
Nope; you're both wrong. It was established to enrich the public domain by encouraging artists and writers to produce more works. It did so by establishing a system like property ownership for things that can't, under ordinary circumstances, be owned (how do you own sound, or thought, or words?)
Copyright's purpose is not to encourage artists and writers to produce works. It's purpose is to encourage artists and writers to publish their works.
These are very different purposes. There is absolutely nothing in the copyright law that encourages the creation of works. The entire purpose of the law is to encourage the publication of works.
The problem with modern copyright law is that the publishers have convinced Congress and the public that they, not authors, are the intended beneficiaries of copyright.
The only type of authors who are actually able to keep their copyrights anymore are certain print authors. Stephen King's books are still, "Copyright 2000 Stephen King." If you want to make your living as a songwriter/performer, however, you will quickly discover that the price of admission -- your "recording contract" -- is that you have to sign over all of your copyrights. All your songs will be, for instance, "Copyright 2000 Warner Communications." If you want to become a filmmaker, the price is the same. "Copyright 2000 United Artists." If you want to write textbooks or make maps, your work is "work for hire", and the copyrights on your works are automatically assigned to your employer. "Copyright 2000 Prentice Hall."
Copyright wasn't always for the benefit of authors. Originally, copyright was conceived as a means of censorship. The British Crown wanted to control book printers, so, in exchange for accepting censorship over what they published, the Crown granted monopolies to individual publishers over works -- even works that they had nothing to do with creating.
One of the great innovations in the Constitution was the change in copyright. A new form of copyright was created -- one that incited publication and was intended to benefit authors. It was a noble experiment -- The founding fathers took something that was absolutely evil and against the public interest -- the Stationer's Copyright -- and recast it into something that was in the public interest -- modern Copyright.
It's taken about 225 years of gradual change in the laws, but copyright has finally reverted to its original purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
That would not be a valid contract. A fundamental principle of contract law is that in order for a contract to be valid, each side must receive consideration, something of value.
For example, if you were to sign a contract that says that you will give your car to me, in exchange for nothing, that contract would be unenforcable. If you sign a contract that says that you will give your car to me, in exchange for one dollar, that contract would be enforcable, because each of us received consideration.
That's why you often hear of someone leasing a piece of land for $1.00. Consideration is a requirement for a legal contract.
In this case, you have already paid for the book, and are the owner of the copy. A shrink-wrap contract on a book would not be valid because in exchange for giving up your right to resell the book, you would receive nothing of value.
You would receive nothing of value because you don't need a license to read a book, or to resell it. You already have that right under copyright law.
Why is this different than software?
With software, the software industry has convinced the courts that when you load the software into your computer is actually making a copy of the software. Making copies is an exclusive right of the copyright holder.
Hence, goes the logic, a shrinkwrap license is a legal contract, because in exchange for agreeing to the restrictive terms of the license, you receive the limited right -- that you would not otherwise have -- to make a copy of the software -- specifically, onto the hard drive and/or into the memory of your computer.
This is the legal logic behind software shrinkwrap licenses.
But for a book, there would be no consideration on the part of the publisher, because the publisher has no right to prevent you from reading or selling the book. You receive those rights when you pay for the book. No license required.
The problem here is one the publishers have created for themselves: They sell the book outright rather than license it with conditions on resale. It would be easy for book publishers to offer their wares as licensed content, just as software is currently distributed.
No it wouldn't. The only reason that software is sold as "licensed content" is because the software companies convinced the judiciary that because installing and using a piece of software requires that the software be copied into a computer's memory, the act of running software is equivalent to the act of making a new copy of that software, which requires the permission of the copyright owner. Therefore, the logic goes, the purchaser of a piece of software can be forced to accept "license terms" which grant the purchaser the right to make copies of the software -- into the computer memory -- in exchange for giving up your rights to reverse engineer the software, transfer the software, etc, etc.
A restrictive "license agreement" is NOT an option generally available to copyright holders to dictate the terms of use of their works. It's an exceptional case that only applies to the software industry.
When you read a book, you are not making a copy of that book. Therefore, even if a publisher tried to include a "license agreement" with their book, it would have no legal standing. As the owner of a legally made copy of a copyrighted work, you have certain rights, under federal law, including:
17 USC 109. Limitations on exclusive rights: Effect of transfer of particular copy or phonorecord
(a) Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106(3), the owner of a particular copy or phonorecord lawfully made under this title, or any person authorized by such owner, is entitled, without the authority of the copyright owner, to sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy or phonorecord.
This right is not optional. It isn't something that can be erased by a "license agreement" by the book publisher. When you purchase a book, and read it, you are in no way making a copy, so you do not require a license. If there happens to be a shrink-wrap license on the book, you can just tear it up and throw it away, because reading the book is a right that you acquired when you purchased the book, as defined by federal law, not part of an agreement between you and the publisher. By not accepting the shrink wrap, you accept the standard "contract."
The standard "contract" under which books are sold to the general public is copyright law, and is fully described by Title 17. Under copyright law, you have legal rights. If you read it through, you'll understand why what you are suggesting is not a legal option for publishers. The key parts are in Section 101, paragraphs 106 and 109.
- John
Publishers of books have absolutely no legal right to impose any sort of "license" on you that would restrict your right to resell a book.
If publishers of books were allowed to impose licensing agreements on books, that would be an elimination of your legal right to resell your books.
Either your right to resell your books comes from copyright law (which it does), or it comes at the whim of publishers (which it doesn't). If you transfer the right to control resale of books from the owners of those books to the copyright holder, then you have eliminated the legal right of owners to resell used books.
I don't understand your argument.
The only reason why software licenses are even considered to perhaps have any legal standing is because the software companies have convinced the legal system that the act of installing or running a computer program involves the "making of a copy" of that program, which is an exclusive right of the copyright holder. Hence, even if you buy and own a disc of computer software, the argument goes, you don't have the right to install it or use it without the permission of the copyright holder, and that consent is given in the form of the shrink-wrap license.
Regardless of what you think about software licenses, there is no "making of a copy" when you read a book, so ordinary copyright law applies to the book, which gives the owner of the copy the full rights to resell the book without the consent or permission of the author, publisher, and/or copyright holder.
Any such "licensing agreement" on books would be legally unenforcable. A "licensing agreement" is not an option generally available to copyright holders. Licensing agreements on software are an artifact of a judicial misunderstanding about the nature of computer software -- a legal error that needs to be corrected, not expanded into the rest of copyright law.
Looks a lot like GLV technology, which I think was covered on slashdot this month.
/ glvmainframeset.html
D =3772
http://www.siliconlight.com/htmlpgs/glvtechframes
http://www.e-town.com/news/article.jhtml?articleI
One of the hot topics on the various projectionists and film collectors forums is digital projection -- and how much resolution is enough.
There are at least two limiting factors.
The first is the size of the film grain. Once you reach a certain resolution, any further increase in resolution goes towards clarifying the individual film grains instead of contributing more picture information. This starts to happen at around a 4K vertical resolution.
The second is the resolution of the human vision system. Again, there isn't much point in having higher resolution than the resolution of the cones in your eye. Again, your visual resolution is approximately reached at 4K resolution over a 60 degree field.
Another advantages of these digital micro-mirror based interference systems is that they can handle tremendous amounts of light, much more than can be passed through motion picture film without melting it.
I'm not surprised that display technology has tended to stagnate -- in order to effectively utilize high resolution (6Kx4K or so) technology, you need to be able to move data fast enough to keep the video pipeline full. I'll bet that in five years, tube monitors and televisions will go the way of tube radios.
I know. I'm baffled by that one!
All that Thomson is doing is laying the groundwork for the abandonment of perceptual encoding. With network speeds improving and storage prices falling, lossless compression schemes like Shorten will inevitably replace lossy compression schemes like jpg and ogg.
.shn files.
Shorten achieves 2:1 lossless compression on audio files. MP3 offers 10:1 lossy compression. Already people are distributing lossless audio files as
If Thomson succeeds in creating a legal cloud around any and all perceptual encoding schemes, this may be the "push" required for the industry to completely abandon lossy compression in favor of unpatented, lossless 2:1 compression.
A year or two down the road, if someone surfaces with a patent on Shorten's 2:1 lossless compression, the net will undoubtedly be able to easily handle uncompressed 1:1 lossless audio.
In short, MP3s are near obsolete, and nothing will force them into the dustbin of history faster than the fear of lawsuits.
Heh.
"Make Money Fast, Do Time Slow"
On a processor, you have facilities like general registers, that the emulated operating system is supposed to use, and that will be saved and restored by the control program when you switch contexts.
You also have certain special registers and facilities, like control registers, and segment registers. The actual contents of these registers are going to always remain under the control of the supervisor. Part of the job of a virtualization supervisor is to emulate the function of these registers, and also to reflect their virtual state to the virtualized operating system when requested.
So basically, in order for the architecture to be virtualizable, all of the instructions that expose the presence of the emulator must be privileged.
This includes things like control registers, status words, I/O instructions, etc. If you're going to "fake out" an operating system into believing that it is running on bare iron, you need to be able to generate an exception whenever the operating system attempts to execute an instruction that exposes the fact that the actual state of the processor is different from the state of the virtual machine.
For instance, one of the mistakes in the IBM System/370 architecture was that the instruction for accessing the hardware time-of-day clock (STCK -- STore ClocK) was a non-privileged instruction. As a consequence, it was impossible to set a different time of day for a virtual machine -- the supervisor couldn't trap the instruction.
Some architectures (I believe that this is one of the X86 sticking points) require privileged state in order to modify certain control registers, but provide non-privileged instructions for accessing the contents of those registers.
For non-virtualizing operating systems, this makes sense. By making the instructions to examine the system state non-privileged, you both simplify the job of writing the operating system (because you don't have to emulate those instructions), and you also receive a performance boost (because executing those instructions don't result in exceptions). The tradeoff comes when you try and implement a virtual machine environment, and find that you can't, because even in protected mode, a program can find out "too much" about the actual state of the processor.
And you think Linux/StarOffice is the answer? All that would result in is the users bringing Win95 CD's from home to get their computers to a point where they found them useful again.
Ok. Here's a solution. Institute a policy. Install Microsoft Windows or any Microsoft software, and you're fired.
IT has to talk to it's users, they have to listen to their users, they have to provide solutions taht the users want!
There are many companies that still to this day use dumb ASCII terminals for a very simple reason. You can't waste time on them. The only thing you can do with an ASCII terminal is job functions. There's no minesweeper, no cute software to download and install. No viruses. No porn.
And no "Microsoft Surprises" like this.
Or alternately, the FBI is suddenly able to produce incriminating email that came from your account that you swore you never sent.
What makes you think the FBI can be trusted? Was it something I said?
The point is, Carnivore was advertised as a way of specifically wiretapping email. This is very different from deliberately writing code to capture passwords.
Yes, you are absolutely right. email packets are no different than RADIUS packets. The point is that the FBI is saying, "Trust us, we won't look at anything that we aren't allowed to look at", yet the document clearly shows that password-stealing capabilities were not only built into the program, but worked "as expected."
This just shows that they have been lying about the capabilities and purpose of their software.
RADIUS captures occurred as expected
This is alarming because it has nothing to do with capturing email.
RADIUS stands for "Remote Access DIal Up Service", and is a login password authentication protocol. If Carnivore is designed to capture RADIUS packets, then it is a password-stealing program, not an email collection program.
I had never heard that Carnivore was designed to steal passwords. I heard that it was designed to collect email. Apparently the censors didn't realize that they left in evidence of a completely different purpose for Carnivore than was represented to the public, or was I misinformed?
Couple this with the HDTV video card talked about recently in slashdot.
That HDTV card can stream MPEG-2 video to disk at the rate of 7.7 GB/Hour
So one of these disks would hold over 18 hours of HDTV-grade video. VHS, goodbye!
In all of those examples, they learned the external characteristics of a desktop environment, image editor, and browsers by examining the running software. But they learned how to create source code that implements those characteristics elsewhere.
Thanks for your comments. I also came from a mainframe background, and was a member of SHARE for many years. I did a lot of work locally modifying the VM & CMS nuclei, and I agree that the same sense of excitement and empowerment existed within the programmers who had access to IBM's licensed source code.
However, IBM stabbed its users in the back when it went Object Code Only on VM. Even though they eventually reversed themselves, and started re-releasing the source code (or at least the output of the PL/X compilation), a lot of damage had been done. There was a turning point when a lot of people realized that having source code available at the whim of a corporation was simply not acceptable. I promote Linux at my workplace because I don't ever want that to happen again. We lost a lot. We had to withdraw popular features from our system because we simply couldn't support them anymore without access to the source code. The axe fell earlier this year, and just a few months ago, a salvage team came in, cut up our three-processor 3090 and had it hauled away for scrap. It's a shame, because VM has some great features that never made it to unix -- CMS pipelines for one.
The difference here is that groups like SHARE were only for IBM customers. You had physical access to the source code, and IBM's implied consent to share your modifications with other IBM customers, but it was all under the control of IBM. The breakthrough of the GPL was in creating a structure where the source code cannot be "recalled" if the "strategic direction" of the company that licensed the source code changes along with the management.
So yes, there have always been small user communities clustered around licensed source code, but this is different because the community is the general public, and the license to use, modify, and redistribute the software is permanent.
I've said this before. Free software, and to a lesser extent, Open Source software, correct a glaring defect in copyright law with respect to software -- it fails to establish a public domain.
Not public domain in the sense of "expired copyright", but public domain in the sense that copyright is supposed to place examples of the art into the public for study and learning. Copyright is supposed to promote disclosure. Publication of object code is not disclosure. It is non-disclosure. Software copyright is a failure in that it grants a monopoly on object code without the required disclosure of the corresponding source code.
Over 99% of the people who purchase a novel will do nothing more with it then use it for entertainment purposes. However, the remaining tiny percent of the purchasers are the next generation's authors. They will read the novel, and from it, learn the art of writing new novels.
Software doesn't work that way. No amount of study of Windows 98 will teach you how to write an operating system. That's because Windows 98 doesn't come with source code. You can use it, but you aren't allowed to understand it. This is no accident. It is the express desire of Microsoft that, in spite of their receiving the benefits of a copyright monopoly, that no one be allowed to read (the technical term for reading object code is "reverse engineering") their copyrighted work. Says so right in their license. Says so, with very few exceptions, in every single license of every single piece of proprietary software on the market.
Imagine if a young student expressed interest in becoming an author, and was told: Ok, but you will have to learn how to write from scratch. There are no examples for you to learn from. You cannot read pre-existing novels. You will have to learn plot development, character development, plot twists, all from scratch -- from textbooks. You must make absolutely sure that you never, ever read someone else's novel, because that would "contaminate" you, and you could never legally write a novel, because you could be sued by the people whose novels you had read.
I don't think that the result would be a "progress" in the art of writing novels. Why should we think that by making every potential software developer "start from scratch" leads to better software?
Now substitute "software" for "novels", and "reverse engineer" for "read", and you will get a statement that most legal departments of software companies would quickly agree with.
No wonder Free software and Open Source software are considered akin to a revolution. For the first time in the history of software the doors are thrown open. People are finally allowed, and encouraged to understand software instead of just use it. The fact that over 99% of the people who use Free and Open Source software will never modify it is irrelevant. What is important is that the tiny fraction of young people who are curious and want to learn how software works so that they can write their own, finally have the opportunity to examine and play with full fledged, working, professional quality software. And in the case of Free software, they have the right to reuse and redistribute their own work -- the modified code.
Free and Open Source software are revolutionary because they transcend the political limits of copyright law, and create what copyright law should have created, but failed to. A way "To promote the progress of science and useful arts."
Yeah, and deadheads report those stores to the Dead's lawyers, who show up with law enforcement officer, confiscate all their infringing merchandise, and open a can of legal whoop-ass on the store. There's "hippy stores" that no longer exist because they tried to leech off the Dead by selling bootlegs.
Why would Deadheads want to go out of their way to deliberately hurt record stores that sell bootlegs, and get bootlegs taken off the shelf and off of ebay?
Consider this statement from Grateful Dead Merchandising, released 01/2000:
The Grateful Dead and our managing organizations have long encouraged the purely non-commercial exchange of music taped at our concerts and those of our individual members. That a new medium of distribution has arisen - digital audio files being traded over the Internet - does not change our policy in this regard.
Our stipulations regarding digital distribution are merely extensions of those long-standing principles and they are as follow:
No commercial gain may be sought by websites offering digital files of our music, whether through advertising, exploiting databases compiled from their traffic, or any other means. All participants in such digital exchange acknowledge and respect the Copyrights of the performers, writers and publishers of the music.
This notice should be clearly posted on all sites engaged in this activity.
We reserve the ability to withdraw our sanction of non-commercial digital music should circumstances arise that compromise our ability to protect and steward the integrity of our work.
As well they should. The Dead have allowed audience taping and tape tradring as a courtesy to their fans, with the only condition being that the music be not sold for profit. Their fans respect this, and have little tolerance or respect for those who don't.
Mrrrp! Wrong- they take it for free. Since you have to give away copies of your binaries for them to work, you sell one copy- then the whole world takes it for free (legally). How can you sell copies?
You customize each binary so that it only works on that user's machine or is tied to a non-reproducable physical device, like a dongle, or has a "license key." I deal with this sort of "hassleware" all the time on unix systems. It's a big pain in the butt when you migrate to a new CPU, with a new CPUid.
You can distribute as many copies of this sort of software as you want, but those copies won't work without a key. Heck, whenever we buy an AIX server, it comes with a raft of CDs full of software that doesn't work, because we haven't purchased a license key for it.
Sure, people can "hack out" these sorts of access control mechanisms, but remember, unlike entertainment software like DVDs, computer software has a short shelf life. The copy protection on version 1.3 of some application only really has to work until version 1.4 is released.
Perhaps you have gotten the idea that people like to pay for things needlessly. If so I'd have a business where I resold air in invisible containers for high prices.
Of course not. They only do so when they have no choice. Removing copyright protection would give people the right to use software without paying for it, and the only possible response from the computer industry, besides going out of business, would be to attempt to remove the ability to use software without paying for it. The only way to remove the ability to freely use software is to conceal the operation of the software -- to not release source code.
Heh- who are your customers in a copyrightless world?
Non-programmers who need and want software. Just like today.
they would probably demand the source code since the only way they would hire you to make something for them would be a one-time commission
I would refuse to provide them with the source code. So would all my competitors. Now what do they do?
Answer: They buy my object code, or my competitor's object code, or go without.
The "upgrade & bug fix scam" has nothing to do with copyright. It has everything to do with access to the underlying source code. If you don't have access to the source code, you can't realistically modify or understand a program.
Without copyright, releasing the source code is giving away the store, which is why very few people would release uncopyrighted source code. The GPL is a way of distributing source code without necessarily giving away the store.
Copyright protects source code just as copyright protects the contents of a novel. People publish novels largely because of the legal (not technological) protection of copyright. GPL'ed software is no different. The difference is that with software you have a choice -- you can publish source code, or object code.
There should be a copyright incentive to publish source code. My point is that the GPL provides an incentive that is lacking in copyright law.
when there is no copyright there is no incentive to hide the source code except in situations such as Gov't secrets.
I couldn't disagree more.
If I write a computer program and distribute it as object-code-only, my customers are forced to come to me for upgrades and bug fixes.
Plus, if I customize the computer program for each customer, then only that customer can effectively make use of the program. If I am writing an application to manage a bookstore, I might hard-code in certain categories, such as books, magazines, etc that make the application useless for managing a toy store. I might hard-code in information to make the program worthless to anyone else -- such as a provision to print out the store's name, address and phone number on the top of each page that gets printed by the software.
I might include calls to a dongle-checking routine, to make sure that no one can use the software except for the person who paid for it.
Even with the legal protection of copyright, there are enormous incentives to hide the source code to software. Those incentives do not disappear if copyright disappears. They only become more acute.
Right now there is no incentive to reveal source code besides the incentives offered by the GPL:
1) You can incorporate other GPL source code and save development time.
2) Your code may, if you're lucky, be subjected to an external audit, and you may receive feedback in the form of bug reports and/or enhancements.
So, the mandatory disclosure of source is simply an artifact of defeating copyright law- not an intrinsic of freedom.
Disclosure of source code does not defeat copyright law. A program has no more or less legal protection if it is released as source code or as object code only.
Disclosure of source code defeats efforts to commit fraud and invasion of privacy. Over and over again, we find that software companies simply cannot resist the urge to secretly collect personal information, and lie about it. You might assume, without knowing better, that you can write an anonymous document using Microsoft Word. Then you find out that Microsoft has arranged for the serial number of your computer to be concealed in every document you write. You are told by Digital Convergance that that nifty little cuecat only reports statistical information about what you scan, but then you discover that it also secretly sends a serial number. How do you know that your Windows 98 software doesn't have back doors to allow Microsoft to tap into your machine? You don't. You simply have to trust Microsoft.
What is freedom if not the ability to protect your own interests? How can you protect your own interests when you are forced to, in effect, wear blindfolds so you can't see what's going on. That's what you do when you use object-code-only software. You are trusting a corporation to safeguard your privacy and interests in the face of overwhelming evidence that these are not the interests of corporations that sell software.
Source code disclosure creates confidence that a program operates as represented. Without source code verification, your privacy and freedom are unprotected.
So yes, I believe that source code is intrinsic to freedom. The fact that very little software is released in source code form has had the result that most software users enjoy very little freedom over their own products. Look in the End User Licenses of all your proprietary software. Where are your rights? What do you actually own? Answer: You don't have any rights, and you don't actually own any of your software. How can freedom exist without rights?
Where have you been? Every 20 years, they are simply extended by another 20 years.
I'm sure RMS would actually prefer a world where there were no copyrights or patents of any sort. The community is about sharing - not about preserving the copyright fallacy. And a totally uninhibited world would have the same net effect as a totally GPL one.
Without copyright, the redistribution provisions of the GPL would be unnecessary. But that's only half of the GPL.
If only software interpreters existed, and if software could only be run by executing the original, human-readable source code, then the source-code disclosure provisions of the GPL would be unnecessary. However, we live in a world of compilers and access-protection schemes. Without copyright, the source-code disclosure provisions of the GPL would be unenforcable. This would destroy a key public benefit of the GPL -- the mandatory disclosure of source code.
Don't forget what the author of the GPL says about copyright: that free software would be much easier to produce and use without it. The GPL does indeed utilize copyright, but the GPL is made necessary by copyright in the first place. Without copyright, the GPL could not exist -- but it would not need to exist. So, personally, I'm with RMS: LEAVE IT.
The GPL is not made necessary by copyright. The GPL is made necessary by the failure of copyright.
Compare computer software to, for instance, a printed novel. There is no such thing as a "closed-source" paperback novel. When you purchase a Stephen King book from the bookstore, you acquire a copy of the work in its most complete, useful form. Granted, >99% of the people who buy the book will put it to no other use then to obtain personal pleasure by reading the book. However, the remaining 1% are extremely important. To a budding author, a novel is a real-life lesson in how to write fiction. To a social critic, a novel is a source of ideas; of quotes; something to criticize and analyze. To a historian, a novel is a snapshot of current events, mores; a source of history. These are the people who advance the progress -- by building new works on the foundation of previous works. That fraction of 1% of a novel's readers will become the writers of the future, and copyright is properly functioning by protecting their right to learn.
However, when you buy a software package, you acquire a copy in a obfuscated, concealed form -- precompiled. You don't know what has been compiled into the program. All you know is that the program is represented to be, say a word processor for instance.
This state of affairs is perfectly acceptable to 99% of the population. Most people will buy, for instance, a copy of Microsoft Word, because they want to use it, not study it.
However, that leaves a critical 1% of the population who are completely unrepresented and abandoned by software copyright law. It is generally against the "license" of a piece of software -- and with the DMCA it is now a felony in certain cases -- for that 1% to attempt to read the program (also known as reverse engineering); to attempt to discover the details of what the program really does and how it actually works. To learn from it.
To a budding programmer, a copy of Windows 98 is useless. It will not teach her how to program a computer. To a computer scientist or researcher, it is worthless. A copy of Windows 98 is not a suitable subject for study. Studying Windows 98 does not teach one about operating system concepts. You can not experiment with Windows 98 by, for instance, replacing or modifying the scheduling algorithm.
The effect of this is obvious. With few exceptions, we are a world of computer users, not computer programmers. Copyright law on software has led to a world of technological illiterates. A person may have the world's most state of the art software sitting in front of them, yet they are forbidden by both the license and by federal law from reading that software to understand how it works. Imagine if writers of fiction were forbidden to read other people's works. If they had to re-invent the ideas of story development, character development, plot twists, all from scratch. That's roughly the situation that budding computer programmers find themselves in. Unless they abandon useless proprietary software packages and base their self-education -- and their own original software -- on the study of GPL'ed programs instead.
How could copyright law on computer software be fixed so as not to promote illiteracy?
The solution is not to eliminate copyright on computer software.
Closed-source software would be just as useless without copyright. A compiled binary is a compiled binary. Removing the copyright restrictions on Windows 98 would not make Windows 98 useful to programmers in the sense that reading a good novel is useful to a young author. Even if copyright were to be removed from software, the only way that a closed-source application could be made useful would be the long, laborious process of reverse engineering -- the reconstruction of the source code. Even then, it would only be an approximation of the original work. Besides, the elimination of copyright on software would only encourage the proliferation of "copy protection" schemes, which benefit no one.
So why not change copyright law structurally?
There is absolutely no constitutional reason not to make source code disclosure a prerequisite for copyright on computer software. The only reasons are political -- software companies want the benefits of copyright, and at the same time the benefits of trade secrets.
The discussion shouldn't be "GPL vs Copyright", or "Copyright -- love it or leave it." Here's the question. There are a small percentage -- less than 1% of the population -- working outside of the "corporate software writing" establishment -- who are able and willing to advance the progress of computer science by reading and understanding source code, and creating new works. Are they better served by the traditional copyright framework, or by the GPL-modified copyright framework? From this vantage point, they seem to be choosing the GPL.
Nope; you're both wrong. It was established to enrich the public domain by encouraging artists and writers to produce more works. It did so by establishing a system like property ownership for things that can't, under ordinary circumstances, be owned (how do you own sound, or thought, or words?)
Copyright's purpose is not to encourage artists and writers to produce works. It's purpose is to encourage artists and writers to publish their works.
These are very different purposes. There is absolutely nothing in the copyright law that encourages the creation of works. The entire purpose of the law is to encourage the publication of works.
The problem with modern copyright law is that the publishers have convinced Congress and the public that they, not authors, are the intended beneficiaries of copyright.
The only type of authors who are actually able to keep their copyrights anymore are certain print authors. Stephen King's books are still, "Copyright 2000 Stephen King." If you want to make your living as a songwriter/performer, however, you will quickly discover that the price of admission -- your "recording contract" -- is that you have to sign over all of your copyrights. All your songs will be, for instance, "Copyright 2000 Warner Communications." If you want to become a filmmaker, the price is the same. "Copyright 2000 United Artists." If you want to write textbooks or make maps, your work is "work for hire", and the copyrights on your works are automatically assigned to your employer. "Copyright 2000 Prentice Hall."
Copyright wasn't always for the benefit of authors. Originally, copyright was conceived as a means of censorship. The British Crown wanted to control book printers, so, in exchange for accepting censorship over what they published, the Crown granted monopolies to individual publishers over works -- even works that they had nothing to do with creating.
One of the great innovations in the Constitution was the change in copyright. A new form of copyright was created -- one that incited publication and was intended to benefit authors. It was a noble experiment -- The founding fathers took something that was absolutely evil and against the public interest -- the Stationer's Copyright -- and recast it into something that was in the public interest -- modern Copyright.
It's taken about 225 years of gradual change in the laws, but copyright has finally reverted to its original purpose.