You say you couldn't use the software, which is not completely true.
Sorry that I didn't spell out that I meant that I couldn't use it from a business point of view. I assumed that readers would be able to figure that out without me having to explain every detail.
Although many people make money selling GPL'ed software, it just doesn't make sense for many business scenarios, in which case the business "can't use the software" (again, in a practical business sense.)
In my case, the business is a small one that I operate out of my home as a sideline. It sells something extremely specialized in very low volume. It's not lucrative, but it has made enough money over the years to be worth my time.
If I were to incorporate any GPL'ed software into it, I would then need to GPL the whole thing (isn't that the whole idea of the GPL?), and the few sales I have would dry up completely. Since it has such a small user base, I would be unlikely to make any money in any of the common open source revenue models, such as selling media or service.
So let's think about this realistically from a business point of view only, not trying to make the world a better place, like your beloved RMS. (Some of us want to be able to afford to shave, take a bath, and subsist on something tastier than toe jam.) I could incorporate a single function that had been translated from unlicensed Fortran to C and GPL'ed, and then lose my entire small business. Or, I could translate the function from Fortran to C myself, where the unspecified license of the original Fortran would remain unspecified in the new version.
So, which would you do?
Remember, you're not allowed to make the world a better place in this scenario, except by providing proprietary, closed-source software to end users that does a useful, highly specialized function, at a price that many are happy to pay.
BTW, my version of freedom is superior to RMS's because it's freer. Isn't that axiomatic? If freedom with a few restrictions is good, freedom without the restrictions must be better. I've always thought it was a great fraud to describe restrictions as "freedom".
You wanted freedom to use someone else's software as you see fit, but you don't want someone else to use your software as they see fit.
That's a textbook case of hypocrisy.
If it makes you feel any better, I have released a small amount of useful software under an MIT-style license for all to use any way they like with full, true freedom. So I'm not all bad.
Anyway, I follow your point. But without the financial incentive that I have in selling my proprietary software, it wouldn't exist in any form. Both my software's users and myself would then be poorer for that. (I've learned that few people will pay for software unless you make them.) And I've received many nice thank-you's from people who paid good money for my hypocrisy - and were happy to do so.
Obviously, software can be licensed different ways, and the choice of license is both a matter of personal preference and pragmatism for various situations. So, use GPL if you like - I'm all in favor of it. It's just not for me.
And if you license your software child via the GPL, don't expect me to adopt your child. It probably deserves a better home than I can provide anyway.
But would there have been a GPL without Stallman? I doubt it. The BSD-type licenses are very different because they don't require copyleft, which is the whole point of the GPL. It's copyleft that keeps the knowledge embodied in code free for others to use.
As I had suggested, the idea of Copyleft is clever, and perhaps even original. But if "necessity is the mother of invention" and RMS hadn't provided the GPL and Copyleft to us, they must either be unnecessary or would have been invented by someone else.
The impact of RMS and his "GNU Manifesto" have been undeniably powerful, but I wonder what the software world would look like if there had never been an RMS. I'm certain that we would still have something like "open source" software. There would still be something like the MIT-style permissive licenses. There would still be a BSD version of Linux. Heck, a college kid from Finland might even still have created his own UNIX kernel, and maybe somebody would have pulled together all the pieces of a UNIX-style ecosystem to create a second UNIX-clone operating system that users were able to contribute to and modify.
Next, someone else might even have invented something like "Copyleft", wherein copyright law is actually used, jujitsu-style, to preserve the ability to copy rather than to limit it. Now, that's a pretty clever idea, but surely someone would have thought of it.
Maybe these things would have happened slower - much as light bulbs and cars might have happened slower without Edison and Ford, but would undoubtedly have happened.
That said, would Communism have happened without "The Communist Manifesto?" I'm not so sure. No idealogy can exist without its ideologue.
There certainly are pros and cons to various FLOSS licenses, and as you illustrate, the GPL/copyleft licenses serve a particular need. What bugs me about "Free Software" as an idealogy is that it's supposed to be about preserving our "freedom". We can all be in favor of, in the abstract, so that's a pretty strong selling point (and therefore, BTW, a pretty good source of demagoguery by RMS.) But when it becomes concrete, we need to think a little harder about exactly which sorts of freedom are gained and lost in each case.
In my own case, I've used a lot of small pieces of dusty old Fortran code that I've transliterated into C, compiled, and sold as part of a proprietary software product. The licensing terms of the Fortran code are unclear because it was published in the 1970s in IEEE journal papers before anybody worried about what the license terms of such things might be. I assume the authors published it for people to use however they like, including in the way that I use it. In my own case, I enjoy the freedom to transform such code and sell it as part of a proprietary product. And the people who are free to buy the product evidently think they're getting a fair deal or they wouldn't buy it.
One particular function I need was once translated by someone else from Fortran to C and then licensed under the GPL, so I couldn't use it. It's unclear to me if the person who did that had any legal basis for doing so because the original Fortran code had no license. In any case, I translated my own version to C independently and moved on using that. Later, the other person's code was relicensed under the LGPL, so I could then use it. But it was too late.
I've run into many such cases where I was not "free" to use GPL code in the way I wanted, and the people who buy my product therefore were not "free" to use it either. However, at least they were free to create their own complex application out of the various GPL-licensed pieces that I couldn't provide to them myself. I doubt that anyone has done so.
"Free Software", as advocated by RMS, is a philosophical position - that everyone should have certain rights over the software they use. The primary concern is toward the interests of the end-user.
In contrast, I've always thought that the primary concern was towards the interests of the software. Think of the software you write as something you want to grow and evolve beyond what you can do for it yourself. The GPL with Copyleft nicely serves your (parental) interests as the author, and the interests of the software as an entity in its own right to grow and evolve.
Now, consider the interests of the end user. The user would want maximum freedom - to use it, to change it, to distribute the source code, or to distribute or sell it in either source or compiled form. However, if he distributes it in compiled form, he maximizes his own interests, but not the interests of the original author and the interests of the software as an entity to grow and evolve.
There's an old saying, "Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins." For example, we restrict the freedom of criminals by putting them in jail in order to allow those who might be their victims to live more freely. So, freedom is a balance. It's important to recognize that although "Free Software" maximizes a particular type of freedom, it limits freedom of other types. It represents a particular vision of Utopia that not everyone shares.
Note that Chrome and Safari are made by two of Microsoft's arch rivals. Evidently they both thought there was a business case for that. I assume that Google, Apple, and Microsoft are generally interested in optimizing the browser experience on their platforms and being a participant in creating future browser standards. And Microsoft wouldn't want to leave its competition in charge of the latter with just a little help from Mozilla, et. al.
That's the problem. You can't prove it prevented a security breach so most users just see it as a PITA extra step and definitely NOT worth the extra trouble.
Agreed. We've heard about high-profile cases like Target (credit card breach), Sony (everything breach), and recently Anthem (personal data breach), but I've never heard of any breaches involving investment/brokerage services, which is the category where I personally might suffer the most damage. However, in my own case, I'm just trying to be proactive by using two-factor authentication on those.
It seems like if hackers could get into one of the major investment/brokerage services, they could siphon off a lot of money in a short time. Yet I've never heard of any such case. So, is there something about financial institutions that protects them against large-scale fraud by hackers? For example, I could imagine that if someone siphoned money out of my brokerage account, the money would have to move through the banking system, where it could be traced and then ultimately could be restored via reversals.
Also, don't lose your phone where evil people might find it.
Forgive me if I've got the following arithmetic wrong, but if they remove one factor from two-factor authentication, doesn't that make it one-factor authentication?
I don't see eliminating passwords as an important goal. Instead, the goal should be to increase security. To that end, I've recently begun to use two-factor authentication on all my important accounts. However, I'm finding that each service implements it differently, so it's a bit annoying to have to remember how to deal with each one. Also, I use one service that requires a hardware token which they mail to you, and that makes it more difficult to get the whole thing set up, compared to the more common case where you just give them your phone number and then two-factor authentication begins to work nearly instantly. So, it would be nice if we had some industry standards on all that.
Since some services make two-factor authentication somewhat difficult to set up, I get the impression that they find that the increased support costs for it to not be worth it, at least from the service's point of view. Of course, from the customer point of view, if it prevents a security breach to an important account, it's well worth the extra trouble.
You don't need to look for kidney stones in bone marrow.
True enough, but which is the best organ in the code corpus to look for buffer overruns?
Your idea of using tools to whittle down the haystack in order to focus the search for needles seems like a good one, but do such security auditing tools already exist? If not, about the only automatic thing I could think of that you could get going in a short time over such a large body of code would be lint or similar static checking tools.
I've worked with a corpus of crypto code which consists of a collection of many of the most well known algorithms. None of the algorithms are very large or complicated individually, though many use "cryptic" [tee-hee] tables that seem pretty opaque to the non-expert. I don't know such table would be easy or hard for the expert to verify, but in my case, I just had to assume they were right. But if the OpenSSL code being audited (screened) consists of a half a million lines, there must be a lot more complicated things going on in it.
Can somebody explain the moderation on this one? Just curious. I'm surprised to see it get taken down to zero. I actually thought it was kind of interesting, though I recognized that not everyone would agree. I've learned that if I step on any of the sacred cows here, I'll get down-modded, but I don't think this one touches on any of those. In fact, it has some things in it that the orthodoxy here might appreciate - such as hoping that Disney wouldn't succeed in extending copyright terms forever. And who can disagree that Beethoven's symphonies should be in the public domain by now?
Actually, it was only George who paid. The others weren't involved, and there were some lawsuits involving some of the songs. I forget the details, but I think it went something like this:
Narrator: In the midst of all this public bickering, "Let it Rot" was released as a film, an album, and a lawsuit. In 1970, Dirk sued Stig, Nasty, and Barry; Barry sued Dirk, Nasty, and Stig; Nasty sued Barry, Dirk, and Stig; and Stig sued himself accidentally. It was the beginning of a golden era for lawyers, but for the Rutles, live on a London rooftop, it was the beginning of the end.
"Welcome to my parlor", said the spider to the fly. (Note: the preceding was used with permission from the spider.)
I was actually being a little flip in agreeing with the prior poster. I was satirizing his apparent conflation of "thoughts and ideas" with copyrights. So, we must back up a little to sort this out.
First, ownership is essentially a legal concept. Therefore, you can "own" anything the law says you can own. And as another poster pointed out, Jefferson even "owned" other human beings, which nearby law allowed at the time.
I certainly can own an idea, in every practical sense, simply by originating it and never communicating it. If I don't own such an idea (and I actually own many), then who does? But none of that involves the law - it's just fun to think about. Aren't you glad I shared that idea with you?
In terms of copyright law, you can't actually own a thought or idea in the normal sense of those terms. For example, you can't copyright a mathematical formula, which is essentially a thought or idea. However, you can copyright a "work", that is a complex, concrete set of ideas. For example, you could copyright a mathematical handbook consisting almost entirely of mathematical formulas and tables which could not be copyrighted individually. In fact, many such works have been copyrighted. Heck, I've even bought some of those myself.
So, how does all this relate to Mickey Mouse? If Mickey is only a thought or idea, you'll have no luck trying to copyright him. But if you commit him to a specific form such as a film, now you've got something. The law allows that film to be copyrighted, and you can even trademark Mickey and then license his image for others to make into toys.
Regarding Mr. Jefferson, he and I agree on more than we disagree on - as usual. From the article you linked:
Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.
So Mr. Jefferson recognizes that what we now call "intellectual property" is within the purview of the law - even if he doesn't much like that idea himself.
Coincidentally, I've just been listening to the "Alladin" soundtrack, which includes "Prince Ali" with music by Alan Menken. The tune sounds a lot like "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To" by Cole Porter. Since Menken hasn't gotten sued for that, I guess Cole Porter's estate isn't as litigious as Marvin Gaye's.
I don't think I missed the point so much as I party disagreed.
Your idea that "Culture is stolen because of extended terms on original works" presupposes that original culture such as Mickey Mouse nominally belongs to the public, which has temporarily granted its creator a monopoly to use and sell this public culture. I see it the other way around: Mickey Mouse nominally belongs to his creator, which loses a right of ownership after some period of time for the net public good. With that premise, it's impossible for Disney to steal its own culture.
Disney, et. al., have succeeded in extending copyright terms, which may not be a good thing. I don't doubt that they'd like to extend that forever, but hopefully they won't succeed in that endeavor. So if copyright doesn't extend forever, how long should it extend?
We can debate whether a Marvin Gaye song from 1977 should be public domain because that's a bit of an edge case. Clearly, a Beethoven symphony from the 1800s should be - and is - public. But if Paul McCartney is still receiving royalties for Beatles recordings from the 1960s, I wouldn't feel that he had stolen any culture from me.
Interesting points, and I largely agree. Restoring balance to the system by changing copyright terms back to their historical norms seems to be a good solution.
That said, I think the Disney copyrights of the works of others apply to their specific manifestations of Pinnochio, et. al. In other words, Disney hasn't actually stolen the underlying culture because we're still free to derive our own works from the originals, though not from Disney's version. For example, we think we know what Pinnochio looks like primarily because Disney artists have drawn him a certain way, not because of illustrations in the original book by Carlo Collodi. In fact, the Wikipedia article on Pinnochio shows a couple of older illustrations which look quite different. So, in that sense, Disney's Pinnochio is somewhat of an original work. (Disney also inevitably changes each story they adapt - not to avoid copyright issues but to make the story "better".)
And neither would the The Rutles. Although in the Rutles case, stealing could be deemed "fair use" in the form of paraody. Then again, what does "Piggy in the Middle" really have to do with "I am the Walrus?" (.tekram ot tnew yggip elttil sihT)
Look, ISIS certainly welcomes you to our community - have no doubt about that. And of course, we certainly want to you feel fully included. But this is a caliphate, and we have certain standards. So, it really isn't asking much that you do exactly what the Caliph has ordained...
"It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it."
That seems like a strange statement coming from someone who is one of the best programmer's on the planet - and who works closely with some of the others.
I don't disagree that C++ provides a lot of rope for substandard programmers to hang themselves with (and I've seen that done by someone who created layer upon layer of useless classes), but I assume Linus Torvalds doesn't hang out with too many "substandard programmers." So what's he afraid of?
Although C++ may not be for everybody, and it's far from ideal, I think it's generally a pretty good solution for the problems it's trying to solve. And it's not just me: it's notable that it dominates its niche as the primary C-inspired, object-oriented, compiled language.
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You say you couldn't use the software, which is not completely true.
Sorry that I didn't spell out that I meant that I couldn't use it from a business point of view. I assumed that readers would be able to figure that out without me having to explain every detail.
Although many people make money selling GPL'ed software, it just doesn't make sense for many business scenarios, in which case the business "can't use the software" (again, in a practical business sense.)
In my case, the business is a small one that I operate out of my home as a sideline. It sells something extremely specialized in very low volume. It's not lucrative, but it has made enough money over the years to be worth my time.
If I were to incorporate any GPL'ed software into it, I would then need to GPL the whole thing (isn't that the whole idea of the GPL?), and the few sales I have would dry up completely. Since it has such a small user base, I would be unlikely to make any money in any of the common open source revenue models, such as selling media or service.
So let's think about this realistically from a business point of view only, not trying to make the world a better place, like your beloved RMS. (Some of us want to be able to afford to shave, take a bath, and subsist on something tastier than toe jam.) I could incorporate a single function that had been translated from unlicensed Fortran to C and GPL'ed, and then lose my entire small business. Or, I could translate the function from Fortran to C myself, where the unspecified license of the original Fortran would remain unspecified in the new version.
So, which would you do?
Remember, you're not allowed to make the world a better place in this scenario, except by providing proprietary, closed-source software to end users that does a useful, highly specialized function, at a price that many are happy to pay.
BTW, my version of freedom is superior to RMS's because it's freer. Isn't that axiomatic? If freedom with a few restrictions is good, freedom without the restrictions must be better. I've always thought it was a great fraud to describe restrictions as "freedom".
You wanted freedom to use someone else's software as you see fit, but you don't want someone else to use your software as they see fit.
That's a textbook case of hypocrisy.
If it makes you feel any better, I have released a small amount of useful software under an MIT-style license for all to use any way they like with full, true freedom. So I'm not all bad.
Anyway, I follow your point. But without the financial incentive that I have in selling my proprietary software, it wouldn't exist in any form. Both my software's users and myself would then be poorer for that. (I've learned that few people will pay for software unless you make them.) And I've received many nice thank-you's from people who paid good money for my hypocrisy - and were happy to do so.
Obviously, software can be licensed different ways, and the choice of license is both a matter of personal preference and pragmatism for various situations. So, use GPL if you like - I'm all in favor of it. It's just not for me.
And if you license your software child via the GPL, don't expect me to adopt your child. It probably deserves a better home than I can provide anyway.
But would there have been a GPL without Stallman? I doubt it. The BSD-type licenses are very different because they don't require copyleft, which is the whole point of the GPL. It's copyleft that keeps the knowledge embodied in code free for others to use.
As I had suggested, the idea of Copyleft is clever, and perhaps even original. But if "necessity is the mother of invention" and RMS hadn't provided the GPL and Copyleft to us, they must either be unnecessary or would have been invented by someone else.
The people who run a black market are dishonest? I'm shocked, shocked!
Correction: "There would still be a BSD version of UNIX".
The impact of RMS and his "GNU Manifesto" have been undeniably powerful, but I wonder what the software world would look like if there had never been an RMS. I'm certain that we would still have something like "open source" software. There would still be something like the MIT-style permissive licenses. There would still be a BSD version of Linux. Heck, a college kid from Finland might even still have created his own UNIX kernel, and maybe somebody would have pulled together all the pieces of a UNIX-style ecosystem to create a second UNIX-clone operating system that users were able to contribute to and modify.
Next, someone else might even have invented something like "Copyleft", wherein copyright law is actually used, jujitsu-style, to preserve the ability to copy rather than to limit it. Now, that's a pretty clever idea, but surely someone would have thought of it.
Maybe these things would have happened slower - much as light bulbs and cars might have happened slower without Edison and Ford, but would undoubtedly have happened.
That said, would Communism have happened without "The Communist Manifesto?" I'm not so sure. No idealogy can exist without its ideologue.
There certainly are pros and cons to various FLOSS licenses, and as you illustrate, the GPL/copyleft licenses serve a particular need. What bugs me about "Free Software" as an idealogy is that it's supposed to be about preserving our "freedom". We can all be in favor of, in the abstract, so that's a pretty strong selling point (and therefore, BTW, a pretty good source of demagoguery by RMS.) But when it becomes concrete, we need to think a little harder about exactly which sorts of freedom are gained and lost in each case.
In my own case, I've used a lot of small pieces of dusty old Fortran code that I've transliterated into C, compiled, and sold as part of a proprietary software product. The licensing terms of the Fortran code are unclear because it was published in the 1970s in IEEE journal papers before anybody worried about what the license terms of such things might be. I assume the authors published it for people to use however they like, including in the way that I use it. In my own case, I enjoy the freedom to transform such code and sell it as part of a proprietary product. And the people who are free to buy the product evidently think they're getting a fair deal or they wouldn't buy it.
One particular function I need was once translated by someone else from Fortran to C and then licensed under the GPL, so I couldn't use it. It's unclear to me if the person who did that had any legal basis for doing so because the original Fortran code had no license. In any case, I translated my own version to C independently and moved on using that. Later, the other person's code was relicensed under the LGPL, so I could then use it. But it was too late.
I've run into many such cases where I was not "free" to use GPL code in the way I wanted, and the people who buy my product therefore were not "free" to use it either. However, at least they were free to create their own complex application out of the various GPL-licensed pieces that I couldn't provide to them myself. I doubt that anyone has done so.
"Free Software", as advocated by RMS, is a philosophical position - that everyone should have certain rights over the software they use. The primary concern is toward the interests of the end-user.
In contrast, I've always thought that the primary concern was towards the interests of the software. Think of the software you write as something you want to grow and evolve beyond what you can do for it yourself. The GPL with Copyleft nicely serves your (parental) interests as the author, and the interests of the software as an entity in its own right to grow and evolve.
Now, consider the interests of the end user. The user would want maximum freedom - to use it, to change it, to distribute the source code, or to distribute or sell it in either source or compiled form. However, if he distributes it in compiled form, he maximizes his own interests, but not the interests of the original author and the interests of the software as an entity to grow and evolve.
There's an old saying, "Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins." For example, we restrict the freedom of criminals by putting them in jail in order to allow those who might be their victims to live more freely. So, freedom is a balance. It's important to recognize that although "Free Software" maximizes a particular type of freedom, it limits freedom of other types. It represents a particular vision of Utopia that not everyone shares.
Note that Chrome and Safari are made by two of Microsoft's arch rivals. Evidently they both thought there was a business case for that. I assume that Google, Apple, and Microsoft are generally interested in optimizing the browser experience on their platforms and being a participant in creating future browser standards. And Microsoft wouldn't want to leave its competition in charge of the latter with just a little help from Mozilla, et. al.
Not to mention air pollution, which is perhaps the primary reason it's no longer made - even in Brazil and Mexico.
That's the problem. You can't prove it prevented a security breach so most users just see it as a PITA extra step and definitely NOT worth the extra trouble.
Agreed. We've heard about high-profile cases like Target (credit card breach), Sony (everything breach), and recently Anthem (personal data breach), but I've never heard of any breaches involving investment/brokerage services, which is the category where I personally might suffer the most damage. However, in my own case, I'm just trying to be proactive by using two-factor authentication on those.
It seems like if hackers could get into one of the major investment/brokerage services, they could siphon off a lot of money in a short time. Yet I've never heard of any such case. So, is there something about financial institutions that protects them against large-scale fraud by hackers? For example, I could imagine that if someone siphoned money out of my brokerage account, the money would have to move through the banking system, where it could be traced and then ultimately could be restored via reversals.
Also, don't lose your phone where evil people might find it.
Forgive me if I've got the following arithmetic wrong, but if they remove one factor from two-factor authentication, doesn't that make it one-factor authentication?
I don't see eliminating passwords as an important goal. Instead, the goal should be to increase security. To that end, I've recently begun to use two-factor authentication on all my important accounts. However, I'm finding that each service implements it differently, so it's a bit annoying to have to remember how to deal with each one. Also, I use one service that requires a hardware token which they mail to you, and that makes it more difficult to get the whole thing set up, compared to the more common case where you just give them your phone number and then two-factor authentication begins to work nearly instantly. So, it would be nice if we had some industry standards on all that.
Since some services make two-factor authentication somewhat difficult to set up, I get the impression that they find that the increased support costs for it to not be worth it, at least from the service's point of view. Of course, from the customer point of view, if it prevents a security breach to an important account, it's well worth the extra trouble.
You don't need to look for kidney stones in bone marrow.
True enough, but which is the best organ in the code corpus to look for buffer overruns?
Your idea of using tools to whittle down the haystack in order to focus the search for needles seems like a good one, but do such security auditing tools already exist? If not, about the only automatic thing I could think of that you could get going in a short time over such a large body of code would be lint or similar static checking tools.
I've worked with a corpus of crypto code which consists of a collection of many of the most well known algorithms. None of the algorithms are very large or complicated individually, though many use "cryptic" [tee-hee] tables that seem pretty opaque to the non-expert. I don't know such table would be easy or hard for the expert to verify, but in my case, I just had to assume they were right. But if the OpenSSL code being audited (screened) consists of a half a million lines, there must be a lot more complicated things going on in it.
I don't think it is possible to secure 447,247 lines of code. I thought there was a chance before I saw that number.
Here's the best part: they can audit the security of nearly a half a million lines of code in "several months".
Can somebody explain the moderation on this one? Just curious. I'm surprised to see it get taken down to zero. I actually thought it was kind of interesting, though I recognized that not everyone would agree. I've learned that if I step on any of the sacred cows here, I'll get down-modded, but I don't think this one touches on any of those. In fact, it has some things in it that the orthodoxy here might appreciate - such as hoping that Disney wouldn't succeed in extending copyright terms forever. And who can disagree that Beethoven's symphonies should be in the public domain by now?
Actually, it was only George who paid. The others weren't involved, and there were some lawsuits involving some of the songs. I forget the details, but I think it went something like this:
Narrator: In the midst of all this public bickering, "Let it Rot" was released as a film, an album, and a lawsuit. In 1970, Dirk sued Stig, Nasty, and Barry; Barry sued Dirk, Nasty, and Stig; Nasty sued Barry, Dirk, and Stig; and Stig sued himself accidentally. It was the beginning of a golden era for lawyers, but for the Rutles, live on a London rooftop, it was the beginning of the end.
"Welcome to my parlor", said the spider to the fly. (Note: the preceding was used with permission from the spider.)
I was actually being a little flip in agreeing with the prior poster. I was satirizing his apparent conflation of "thoughts and ideas" with copyrights. So, we must back up a little to sort this out.
First, ownership is essentially a legal concept. Therefore, you can "own" anything the law says you can own. And as another poster pointed out, Jefferson even "owned" other human beings, which nearby law allowed at the time.
I certainly can own an idea, in every practical sense, simply by originating it and never communicating it. If I don't own such an idea (and I actually own many), then who does? But none of that involves the law - it's just fun to think about. Aren't you glad I shared that idea with you?
In terms of copyright law, you can't actually own a thought or idea in the normal sense of those terms. For example, you can't copyright a mathematical formula, which is essentially a thought or idea. However, you can copyright a "work", that is a complex, concrete set of ideas. For example, you could copyright a mathematical handbook consisting almost entirely of mathematical formulas and tables which could not be copyrighted individually. In fact, many such works have been copyrighted. Heck, I've even bought some of those myself.
So, how does all this relate to Mickey Mouse? If Mickey is only a thought or idea, you'll have no luck trying to copyright him. But if you commit him to a specific form such as a film, now you've got something. The law allows that film to be copyrighted, and you can even trademark Mickey and then license his image for others to make into toys.
Regarding Mr. Jefferson, he and I agree on more than we disagree on - as usual. From the article you linked:
Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.
So Mr. Jefferson recognizes that what we now call "intellectual property" is within the purview of the law - even if he doesn't much like that idea himself.
I agree.
Coincidentally, I've just been listening to the "Alladin" soundtrack, which includes "Prince Ali" with music by Alan Menken. The tune sounds a lot like "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To" by Cole Porter. Since Menken hasn't gotten sued for that, I guess Cole Porter's estate isn't as litigious as Marvin Gaye's.
I don't think I missed the point so much as I party disagreed.
Your idea that "Culture is stolen because of extended terms on original works" presupposes that original culture such as Mickey Mouse nominally belongs to the public, which has temporarily granted its creator a monopoly to use and sell this public culture. I see it the other way around: Mickey Mouse nominally belongs to his creator, which loses a right of ownership after some period of time for the net public good. With that premise, it's impossible for Disney to steal its own culture.
Disney, et. al., have succeeded in extending copyright terms, which may not be a good thing. I don't doubt that they'd like to extend that forever, but hopefully they won't succeed in that endeavor. So if copyright doesn't extend forever, how long should it extend?
We can debate whether a Marvin Gaye song from 1977 should be public domain because that's a bit of an edge case. Clearly, a Beethoven symphony from the 1800s should be - and is - public. But if Paul McCartney is still receiving royalties for Beatles recordings from the 1960s, I wouldn't feel that he had stolen any culture from me.
Interesting points, and I largely agree. Restoring balance to the system by changing copyright terms back to their historical norms seems to be a good solution.
That said, I think the Disney copyrights of the works of others apply to their specific manifestations of Pinnochio, et. al. In other words, Disney hasn't actually stolen the underlying culture because we're still free to derive our own works from the originals, though not from Disney's version. For example, we think we know what Pinnochio looks like primarily because Disney artists have drawn him a certain way, not because of illustrations in the original book by Carlo Collodi. In fact, the Wikipedia article on Pinnochio shows a couple of older illustrations which look quite different. So, in that sense, Disney's Pinnochio is somewhat of an original work. (Disney also inevitably changes each story they adapt - not to avoid copyright issues but to make the story "better".)
And neither would the The Rutles. Although in the Rutles case, stealing could be deemed "fair use" in the form of paraody. Then again, what does "Piggy in the Middle" really have to do with "I am the Walrus?" (.tekram ot tnew yggip elttil sihT)
Look, ISIS certainly welcomes you to our community - have no doubt about that. And of course, we certainly want to you feel fully included. But this is a caliphate, and we have certain standards. So, it really isn't asking much that you do exactly what the Caliph has ordained...
"It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it."
That seems like a strange statement coming from someone who is one of the best programmer's on the planet - and who works closely with some of the others.
I don't disagree that C++ provides a lot of rope for substandard programmers to hang themselves with (and I've seen that done by someone who created layer upon layer of useless classes), but I assume Linus Torvalds doesn't hang out with too many "substandard programmers." So what's he afraid of?
Although C++ may not be for everybody, and it's far from ideal, I think it's generally a pretty good solution for the problems it's trying to solve. And it's not just me: it's notable that it dominates its niche as the primary C-inspired, object-oriented, compiled language.
Didn't /. run an article on this before? Wait a minute, am I maybe part of the experiment...?