I was trying to come up with a similar situation in which those who abet crimes by the public are found guilty of those crimes, whilst the public continue to commit them in ever larger numbers and find nothing reprehensible in their behaviour.
Slavery, segregation, prohibition and copyright are all laws that derogate from people's natural right to liberty, whether in the interests of commerce, racism, or religion.
Copyright of 1790 was as unconstitutional then as it is now. It's just that it's only when its privileging of publishers to constrain culture actually starts affecting people directly that they realise something's gone terribly wrong. A reproduction monopoly for the owners of printing presses may be tolerated by printers and the authors that seek their patronage, but woe betide them if they seek to enforce it against the population at large.
Today we are all printers. The market for copies has ended.
One could imagine a trial in New York, 90 years ago that would probably find a similar crew guilty of directing tourists to speakeasy clubs, i.e. assisting in the sale of liquor.
The US constitution did not specify that author's should be granted a reproduction monopoly, but that their exclusive right to their writings should be secured.
Copyright is, by definition, the exclusive right to copy a particular work.
Not at all.
An author's exclusive right to their writings is natural and self-evident.
Copyright is a transferable privilege (a reproduction monopoly) that helps secure this right.
Theft would be to remove or copy a work to which an author had an exclusive right without the author's permission.
Infringement would be to make a copy (of a legitimate copy in your possession) without its copyright holder's permission.
An author's exclusive right to their writings is recognised by the US constitution. The unnatural reproduction monopoly known as copyright cannot be so recognised (where it exceeds the securing of the exclusive right), despite being subsequently legislated - as it should not have been because it derogates others' right to liberty, i.e. that the people may share and build upon the published works they purchase.
Neither copying an LP nor printing a dollar bill causes any harm. However, presenting either as genuine (if it is not) is liable to, as it may impair the truth (the public's apprehension thereof).
We need to take care in distinguishing unnatural monopolies such as copyright from falsehoods such as public acts of plagiarism or passing of forgeries.
We should also recognise that falsehoods committed in the privacy of one's home cannot cause harm whilst they remain private.
So, counterfeiting was not such a good exception to retaliate with.
Selling one's dispensable organs (kidneys) might have been a better example to use, of a business model that should still warrant the state's intrusion into the private domain to thwart.
This is because the right to life exceeds the right to privacy, however the right to truth does not.
The state is supposed to protect all its citizens' rights. What it should never do is grant monopolies to corporations that suspend citizens' cultural liberty and invade their privacy. That this error may be difficult for most people to recognise should not be suprising, after all, copyright was legislated only three years after the ink had dried on the US constitution.
* Seek culture, but not at the expense of liberty
* Seek liberty, but not at the expense of truth
* Seek truth, but not at the expense of privacy
* Seek privacy, but not at the expense of life
* Seek life, and enjoy free culture.
So we have non-DST all year round and work from 8am to 4pm so that midday is always when the sun is at its zenith.
Those at certain latitudes could also have summer hours of 7:30am to 4:30pm, and winter hours of 8:30am to 3:30pm, i.e. a shorter business day in the winter.
Midday and daylight hours are going to vary throughout the year and across the planet anyway.
'Fair Use' is what's left of the right to copy after most of it has been suspended to create a privilege to benefit publishers (in the belief this ultimately benefits the public).
You have a right to copy anything you create, purchase, or discover. The state has suspended this right apart from those few exceptions it terms 'fair use', but those exceptions only come into effect as defences after you have been prosecuted for copyright infringement, not before. There can be no 'fair use' without infringement.
It would be better to demand the complete restoration of the right to copy, and to abolish copyright, than to quibble about whether certain exceptions should be acknowledged prior to the commencement of any litigation.
I wouldn't be so quick to lay the blame for copyright with the Founding Fathers. See Mythologising Copyright. Copyright was enacted 3 years after the constitution.
Even the GPL respects an author's (constitutionally recognised) exclusive rights, it simply undoes the monopoly (unconstitutionally) granted by copyright over published works.
Each artist could have their own pool on their own website. Then only their true fans would pay them to produce more art.
All you need for this is a simple mechanism that ensures the artist only gets paid if they produce the art their audience paid them to.
There's no need for a monopoly or a tax.
Each artist effectively becomes their own collection society.
We now have the technology to enable artists to directly connect with their audience. Monopoly incentivised record labels and state funding are no longer the only options available.
Yup, "the law is more frequently deciding in favour of the privileged."
Copyright and patent are privileges, not rights.
Rights are natural and merely need to be recognised, whereas privileges such as copyright and patent are statutorily granted - with the feeble excuse that these incentivise the publication of intellectual works.
Copyright co-incidentally secures the natural exclusive rights of authors, but given those rights naturally terminate upon publication, copyright also grants a privilege of exclusive reproduction of published works.
Given such monopolies are highly lucrative it is not surprising that the legislature is persuaded to assist publishing corporations - even at the expense of persecuting the public.
These terms of which you speak have not been agreed between artist and audience, but between state and publisher. The state agrees to suspend the public's natural liberty to copy published works in order that publishers can exploit it to sell them the copies they are otherwise forbidden to produce.
Even without this state granted privilege, an artist still wouldn't be able to contract a purchaser to alienate themselves from their natural liberty to produce duplicate or derivative works.
Slavery is all about the alienation of a person from their natural right to liberty, whether to roam or to speak freely. Such liberty is freedom unconstrained except for the impairment of truth, violation of another's privacy, or the harming of another's life.
The BSD is an abdication and permits the re-application of copyright to suspend freedom. It is not at all equivalent to neutralising copyright.
The GPL protects the public's freedom to all descendant derivatives not just a particular copy. This is why the GPL is a far better neutralisation of copyright than the BSD.
Even the GPL doesn't compel authors of derivatives to publish their work. It only says that if they publish any derivative they must include source.
I'm arguing that this rider is only forgivable in a world in which copyright exists, that such a legal compulsion would be unnecessary, indeed unethical, in a world in which copyright has been abolished.
How can I provide examples of how a software market operates in a world without copyright given such a world has not existed for three centuries let alone ever? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing) gives a glimpse of how things operated before publishers realised that they might benefit if software were subject to copyright.
Ultimately, it is a monopoly that raises the price of something far above its manufacturing cost. If a binary derivative of source code costs nothing to make, it will end up being priced low, even if you are the sole supplier. You can only sell it once. The real value is in the labour and this is where the money is, i.e. the source code that represents that labour. However, if the binary substitutes for the source, then there's no point letting it cannibalise the sale of the source. If someone is happy to buy a binary at $10 that cost $1,000 in labour to produce, and the cost of that labour will then never be recouped unless further improvements are required, the binary will be priced at $1,100 and the source at perhaps an additional $400.
However, the argument isn't that source is more valuable than a binary (I'd agree it is), but that somehow, permitting a someone to sell/distribute a binary without source restricts the freedom of those who choose to purchase/receive it.
My argument is that it doesn't restrict anyone's freedom at all. If you want the source, buy it. Free as in speech, not as in beer.
The reason is, in a market in which software can be freely copied, the only thing worth buying is that which isn't readily available, i.e. unpublished software (commissioned apps, features or fixes).
We're already seeing this today. GPL software is generally free of charge once it's been published.
Now, if you're going to pay for software you're going to pay more for source code than binaries, because the source is more valuable.
The vendor can sell one copy of the binary and one copy of the source.
Why is it such a crime to allow them to sell one copy of the binary at $100 followed by one copy of the source at $10,000?
In fact what if they gave the binary away and kept the source unpublished until someone decided to buy it?
Should the source code be confiscated from them even though they've done $10,000 worth of software development work and haven't yet been paid for it?
Even the GPL doesn't compel publication of source code to unpublished work. Why should the simple act of a binary being published render the source code forfeit?
Human rights are legally protected, self-evident, natural rights. Copyright and patent are mercantile privileges, thus unnatural and unethical.
Copyright infringement is the unauthorised copying of a work protected by copyright.
Intellectual property theft is the unauthorised removal of someone's intellectual property from their private premises.
Copyright is an unethical privilege and an ineffective anachronism and should be abolished. Patent similarly, especially as applied to software.
Intellectual property rights are entirely natural and to be protected, especially from interference by the unnatural privileges of copyright and patent.
No-one has a right to publish someone else's work as their own. In any case, copyright is about protecting a commercial reproduction monopoly, not about preventing plagiarism.
My apologies, I assumed we were talking about an underlying RDBMS system in which the source code was public, but that an improver called Oracle might decide to offer improvements in the form of binaries priced differently from source.
We do need to start from a clean slate rather than consider companies who've build up a closed system under copyright.
Substitute MySQL in my previous post, and then consider why a company or customer would consider a market for binary-only improvements rather than with-source improvements.
No matter the imagined motivations for selling binaries, you also need customers who'd consider them superior value for money over source code.
Copyright is about copying, not about independent creation or discovery (as patent is).
So provenance is vital.
If two people independently, coincidentally produce the same poem, this is not copyright infringement. There is only infringement if one person has copied the 'original' work of another.
Similarity is only used as a clue that infringement may have occurred - similarity is not sufficient to determine infringement.
Imagine that you are in a world without copyright and Oracle offer you some custom development to provide obscure feature X.
Are you really telling me you'd pay them the same amount of money for fX+binary as for fX+source?
Let's say you would pay the same. You clearly don't value the source code, so there's no loss to you.
However, more realistically, let's say you highly value the source code, but Oracle say the source is $10,000, with the binary just $1,000.
You are the only customer for this obscure fX, so Oracle only stands to make $1,000 if you don't value the source an order of magnitude higher. However, their competition offers to provide you with the same feature fX', but they also include the source at $1,100. How has Oracle withholding the source helped prevent competition?
And that 'freedom to take freedom away' is the privilege of copyright and patent.
Without such privilege there is no power to 'take freedom away'.
Freedom is of course still constrained by human rights, i.e. to life, privacy, and truth.
You still don't have the freedom to claim someone else's work is your own. You still don't have the freedom to burgle someone's house and take a copy of their hard drive. You still don't have the freedom to deliberately introduce bugs into avionics software because you have a religious grudge.
People involved in file-sharing have already settled litigation out of court - even when they know they're entirely innocent. Guilt is immaterial if you want to avoid the penury of prosecution.
The 'bad actors' who are sued are those the **AA wishes to make an example of to other 'bad actors' - the more naive and apparently unprosecutable the better. After all, file-sharing is a problem precisely because it's engaged in by kids and their apple pie making grannies. If it was only incorrigible pirates that did it, what would be the point of litigated settlement?
In your classes of Brightnet participant, the ones being sued would be random 'participants' irrespective of what particular role classification you'd give them.
A decade later someone might look a little more closely to see if any copies or derivatives of copyrighted works are actually prepared or distributed by participants of Brightnets, and possibly whether only certain participants could be prosecuted (subject to being determinable), but by that time umpteen thousand geeks have missed out on a college education and find themselves on a watch-list of IP thieves along with other cyber-pariahs such as terrorists, paedophiles, and crackers.
If you're going to organise the flouting of copyright then call yourself protestants and martyr yourselves against the catholic maximalism of the modern Spanish inquisition. You still suffer the same, but at least you exhibit the courage of conviction.
The GPL obliges provision of source code because it operates in a copyright encumbered culture, and needs to persuade licensees used to the proprietary software development business model that there is no benefit to withholding source (their inculcated inclination).
There is no need to oblige disclosure of source to derivatives in a culture used to operating without copyright.
Looking at it another way, tell me why in a culture without copyright you'd have to enact a law that prohibited the distribution of binaries without source code? Would you have special stormtroopers that would raid Jimmy's bedroom because he was caught distributing binaries without source code?
No-one's freedom is constrained if the source is withheld or obfuscated in a culture without copyright. However, there is no market for withheld or obfuscated source code in such a culture. Binaries cost nothing to make and could not be sold - they'd only be used to demonstrate that the software had been produced prior to sale.
The GPL is about reproducing the culture that would result if copyright and patent were abolished, i.e. a free culture. But remember, free as in speech, not as in beer. You still buy and sell software in a free culture, just not copies or trivial derivatives such as binaries.
Ahem, rights are not provided to creatives. Rights are self-evident and belong to all human beings - irrespective of whether they choose to be creative.
Privileges have been provided to publishers for their original works, and to manufacturers for the publication of their novel designs.
These privileges unethically suspend the rights of human beings in order to provide commercial reward (supposedly in the public interest). If you ask me, that is cutting off your nose to make your face prettier.
I suggest we'd all be better off as equals, and not elevate publishers or manufacturers above citizens such that they can consequently persecute citizens when they fail to respect those privileges.
But then, without copyright there is absolutely no need for the GPL.
I'm amused by this strange idea that if a society wished to provide its citizens with the right to free speech and free cultural exchange they'd first have to enact a law that would prohibit such freedom.
Bear in mind that the GPL is a means to enjoy freedom, not a means to enjoy the operation of the GPL in a copyright encumbered society.
Slashdot Mirror
I was trying to come up with a similar situation in which those who abet crimes by the public are found guilty of those crimes, whilst the public continue to commit them in ever larger numbers and find nothing reprehensible in their behaviour.
Slavery, segregation, prohibition and copyright are all laws that derogate from people's natural right to liberty, whether in the interests of commerce, racism, or religion.
Copyright of 1790 was as unconstitutional then as it is now. It's just that it's only when its privileging of publishers to constrain culture actually starts affecting people directly that they realise something's gone terribly wrong. A reproduction monopoly for the owners of printing presses may be tolerated by printers and the authors that seek their patronage, but woe betide them if they seek to enforce it against the population at large.
Today we are all printers. The market for copies has ended.
One could imagine a trial in New York, 90 years ago that would probably find a similar crew guilty of directing tourists to speakeasy clubs, i.e. assisting in the sale of liquor.
Prohibition was abolished 14 years later.
Not long now...
Which it shouldn't.
The US constitution did not specify that author's should be granted a reproduction monopoly, but that their exclusive right to their writings should be secured.
See An Author's Exclusive Right for more detail.
Not at all.
An author's exclusive right to their writings is natural and self-evident.
Copyright is a transferable privilege (a reproduction monopoly) that helps secure this right.
Theft would be to remove or copy a work to which an author had an exclusive right without the author's permission.
Infringement would be to make a copy (of a legitimate copy in your possession) without its copyright holder's permission.
An author's exclusive right to their writings is recognised by the US constitution. The unnatural reproduction monopoly known as copyright cannot be so recognised (where it exceeds the securing of the exclusive right), despite being subsequently legislated - as it should not have been because it derogates others' right to liberty, i.e. that the people may share and build upon the published works they purchase.
Neither copying an LP nor printing a dollar bill causes any harm. However, presenting either as genuine (if it is not) is liable to, as it may impair the truth (the public's apprehension thereof).
We need to take care in distinguishing unnatural monopolies such as copyright from falsehoods such as public acts of plagiarism or passing of forgeries.
We should also recognise that falsehoods committed in the privacy of one's home cannot cause harm whilst they remain private.
So, counterfeiting was not such a good exception to retaliate with.
Selling one's dispensable organs (kidneys) might have been a better example to use, of a business model that should still warrant the state's intrusion into the private domain to thwart.
This is because the right to life exceeds the right to privacy, however the right to truth does not.
The state is supposed to protect all its citizens' rights. What it should never do is grant monopolies to corporations that suspend citizens' cultural liberty and invade their privacy. That this error may be difficult for most people to recognise should not be suprising, after all, copyright was legislated only three years after the ink had dried on the US constitution.
* Seek culture, but not at the expense of liberty
* Seek liberty, but not at the expense of truth
* Seek truth, but not at the expense of privacy
* Seek privacy, but not at the expense of life
* Seek life, and enjoy free culture.
So we have non-DST all year round and work from 8am to 4pm so that midday is always when the sun is at its zenith.
Those at certain latitudes could also have summer hours of 7:30am to 4:30pm, and winter hours of 8:30am to 3:30pm, i.e. a shorter business day in the winter.
Midday and daylight hours are going to vary throughout the year and across the planet anyway.
'Fair Use' is what's left of the right to copy after most of it has been suspended to create a privilege to benefit publishers (in the belief this ultimately benefits the public).
You have a right to copy anything you create, purchase, or discover. The state has suspended this right apart from those few exceptions it terms 'fair use', but those exceptions only come into effect as defences after you have been prosecuted for copyright infringement, not before. There can be no 'fair use' without infringement.
It would be better to demand the complete restoration of the right to copy, and to abolish copyright, than to quibble about whether certain exceptions should be acknowledged prior to the commencement of any litigation.
I wouldn't be so quick to lay the blame for copyright with the Founding Fathers. See Mythologising Copyright. Copyright was enacted 3 years after the constitution.
Even the GPL respects an author's (constitutionally recognised) exclusive rights, it simply undoes the monopoly (unconstitutionally) granted by copyright over published works.
You may be amused by:
http://tdaa.digitalproductions.co.uk/history/bcbm.htm
Each artist could have their own pool on their own website. Then only their true fans would pay them to produce more art.
All you need for this is a simple mechanism that ensures the artist only gets paid if they produce the art their audience paid them to.
There's no need for a monopoly or a tax.
Each artist effectively becomes their own collection society.
We now have the technology to enable artists to directly connect with their audience. Monopoly incentivised record labels and state funding are no longer the only options available.
Yup, "the law is more frequently deciding in favour of the privileged ."
Copyright and patent are privileges, not rights.
Rights are natural and merely need to be recognised, whereas privileges such as copyright and patent are statutorily granted - with the feeble excuse that these incentivise the publication of intellectual works.
Copyright co-incidentally secures the natural exclusive rights of authors, but given those rights naturally terminate upon publication, copyright also grants a privilege of exclusive reproduction of published works.
Given such monopolies are highly lucrative it is not surprising that the legislature is persuaded to assist publishing corporations - even at the expense of persecuting the public.
If everyone's search records and IPs are made public this thwarts the value of Viacom becoming privy, via rather underhanded means.
These terms of which you speak have not been agreed between artist and audience, but between state and publisher. The state agrees to suspend the public's natural liberty to copy published works in order that publishers can exploit it to sell them the copies they are otherwise forbidden to produce.
Even without this state granted privilege, an artist still wouldn't be able to contract a purchaser to alienate themselves from their natural liberty to produce duplicate or derivative works.
Slavery is all about the alienation of a person from their natural right to liberty, whether to roam or to speak freely. Such liberty is freedom unconstrained except for the impairment of truth, violation of another's privacy, or the harming of another's life.
The BSD is an abdication and permits the re-application of copyright to suspend freedom. It is not at all equivalent to neutralising copyright.
The GPL protects the public's freedom to all descendant derivatives not just a particular copy. This is why the GPL is a far better neutralisation of copyright than the BSD.
Even the GPL doesn't compel authors of derivatives to publish their work. It only says that if they publish any derivative they must include source.
I'm arguing that this rider is only forgivable in a world in which copyright exists, that such a legal compulsion would be unnecessary, indeed unethical, in a world in which copyright has been abolished.
How can I provide examples of how a software market operates in a world without copyright given such a world has not existed for three centuries let alone ever? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing) gives a glimpse of how things operated before publishers realised that they might benefit if software were subject to copyright.
Ultimately, it is a monopoly that raises the price of something far above its manufacturing cost. If a binary derivative of source code costs nothing to make, it will end up being priced low, even if you are the sole supplier. You can only sell it once. The real value is in the labour and this is where the money is, i.e. the source code that represents that labour. However, if the binary substitutes for the source, then there's no point letting it cannibalise the sale of the source. If someone is happy to buy a binary at $10 that cost $1,000 in labour to produce, and the cost of that labour will then never be recouped unless further improvements are required, the binary will be priced at $1,100 and the source at perhaps an additional $400.
However, the argument isn't that source is more valuable than a binary (I'd agree it is), but that somehow, permitting a someone to sell/distribute a binary without source restricts the freedom of those who choose to purchase/receive it.
My argument is that it doesn't restrict anyone's freedom at all. If you want the source, buy it. Free as in speech, not as in beer.
The reason is, in a market in which software can be freely copied, the only thing worth buying is that which isn't readily available, i.e. unpublished software (commissioned apps, features or fixes).
We're already seeing this today. GPL software is generally free of charge once it's been published.
Now, if you're going to pay for software you're going to pay more for source code than binaries, because the source is more valuable.
The vendor can sell one copy of the binary and one copy of the source.
Why is it such a crime to allow them to sell one copy of the binary at $100 followed by one copy of the source at $10,000?
In fact what if they gave the binary away and kept the source unpublished until someone decided to buy it?
Should the source code be confiscated from them even though they've done $10,000 worth of software development work and haven't yet been paid for it?
Even the GPL doesn't compel publication of source code to unpublished work. Why should the simple act of a binary being published render the source code forfeit?
Human rights are legally protected, self-evident, natural rights. Copyright and patent are mercantile privileges, thus unnatural and unethical.
Copyright infringement is the unauthorised copying of a work protected by copyright.
Intellectual property theft is the unauthorised removal of someone's intellectual property from their private premises.
Copyright is an unethical privilege and an ineffective anachronism and should be abolished. Patent similarly, especially as applied to software.
Intellectual property rights are entirely natural and to be protected, especially from interference by the unnatural privileges of copyright and patent.
No-one has a right to publish someone else's work as their own. In any case, copyright is about protecting a commercial reproduction monopoly, not about preventing plagiarism.
My apologies, I assumed we were talking about an underlying RDBMS system in which the source code was public, but that an improver called Oracle might decide to offer improvements in the form of binaries priced differently from source.
We do need to start from a clean slate rather than consider companies who've build up a closed system under copyright.
Substitute MySQL in my previous post, and then consider why a company or customer would consider a market for binary-only improvements rather than with-source improvements.
No matter the imagined motivations for selling binaries, you also need customers who'd consider them superior value for money over source code.
Copyright is about copying, not about independent creation or discovery (as patent is).
So provenance is vital.
If two people independently, coincidentally produce the same poem, this is not copyright infringement. There is only infringement if one person has copied the 'original' work of another.
Similarity is only used as a clue that infringement may have occurred - similarity is not sufficient to determine infringement.
Imagine that you are in a world without copyright and Oracle offer you some custom development to provide obscure feature X.
Are you really telling me you'd pay them the same amount of money for fX+binary as for fX+source?
Let's say you would pay the same. You clearly don't value the source code, so there's no loss to you.
However, more realistically, let's say you highly value the source code, but Oracle say the source is $10,000, with the binary just $1,000.
You are the only customer for this obscure fX, so Oracle only stands to make $1,000 if you don't value the source an order of magnitude higher. However, their competition offers to provide you with the same feature fX', but they also include the source at $1,100. How has Oracle withholding the source helped prevent competition?
And that 'freedom to take freedom away' is the privilege of copyright and patent.
Without such privilege there is no power to 'take freedom away'.
Freedom is of course still constrained by human rights, i.e. to life, privacy, and truth.
You still don't have the freedom to claim someone else's work is your own.
You still don't have the freedom to burgle someone's house and take a copy of their hard drive.
You still don't have the freedom to deliberately introduce bugs into avionics software because you have a religious grudge.
People involved in file-sharing have already settled litigation out of court - even when they know they're entirely innocent. Guilt is immaterial if you want to avoid the penury of prosecution.
The 'bad actors' who are sued are those the **AA wishes to make an example of to other 'bad actors' - the more naive and apparently unprosecutable the better. After all, file-sharing is a problem precisely because it's engaged in by kids and their apple pie making grannies. If it was only incorrigible pirates that did it, what would be the point of litigated settlement?
In your classes of Brightnet participant, the ones being sued would be random 'participants' irrespective of what particular role classification you'd give them.
A decade later someone might look a little more closely to see if any copies or derivatives of copyrighted works are actually prepared or distributed by participants of Brightnets, and possibly whether only certain participants could be prosecuted (subject to being determinable), but by that time umpteen thousand geeks have missed out on a college education and find themselves on a watch-list of IP thieves along with other cyber-pariahs such as terrorists, paedophiles, and crackers.
If you're going to organise the flouting of copyright then call yourself protestants and martyr yourselves against the catholic maximalism of the modern Spanish inquisition. You still suffer the same, but at least you exhibit the courage of conviction.
The GPL obliges provision of source code because it operates in a copyright encumbered culture, and needs to persuade licensees used to the proprietary software development business model that there is no benefit to withholding source (their inculcated inclination).
There is no need to oblige disclosure of source to derivatives in a culture used to operating without copyright.
Looking at it another way, tell me why in a culture without copyright you'd have to enact a law that prohibited the distribution of binaries without source code? Would you have special stormtroopers that would raid Jimmy's bedroom because he was caught distributing binaries without source code?
No-one's freedom is constrained if the source is withheld or obfuscated in a culture without copyright. However, there is no market for withheld or obfuscated source code in such a culture. Binaries cost nothing to make and could not be sold - they'd only be used to demonstrate that the software had been produced prior to sale.
The GPL is about reproducing the culture that would result if copyright and patent were abolished, i.e. a free culture. But remember, free as in speech, not as in beer. You still buy and sell software in a free culture, just not copies or trivial derivatives such as binaries.
Ahem, rights are not provided to creatives. Rights are self-evident and belong to all human beings - irrespective of whether they choose to be creative.
Privileges have been provided to publishers for their original works, and to manufacturers for the publication of their novel designs.
These privileges unethically suspend the rights of human beings in order to provide commercial reward (supposedly in the public interest). If you ask me, that is cutting off your nose to make your face prettier.
I suggest we'd all be better off as equals, and not elevate publishers or manufacturers above citizens such that they can consequently persecute citizens when they fail to respect those privileges.
Of course.
But then, without copyright there is absolutely no need for the GPL.
I'm amused by this strange idea that if a society wished to provide its citizens with the right to free speech and free cultural exchange they'd first have to enact a law that would prohibit such freedom.
Bear in mind that the GPL is a means to enjoy freedom, not a means to enjoy the operation of the GPL in a copyright encumbered society.