Thing is, there is no law against writing file-sharing software. There is no control of what people use it for, and it doesn't matter if you mean for it to be used for illegal purposes, if it is not you who are actually committing any illegal action, or soliciting it. Surely your intent in the matter is not equivalent to soliciting illegal action.
Every step towards enforcing copyright is a step back. People should be able to create derivative works and advance the state of the art, rather than re-reaching the state of the art in every work, because it is copyrighted for unlimited times. Copyright yields not only lack of freedom, but also inherent inefficiency.
Amazing how asking somebody to actually pay for something is "limiting the freedom of all society."
No, the payment is not the problem! I don't mind people asking for payment for whatever action that is requested of them. Its the limitation on the freedom after receiving a copy that I am talking about. I have no problem with someone demanding 1 million dollars for a copy of his information. After buying such a copy, my freedom should not be limited to use that copy as I wish, including helping my neighbor with it.
Now, I thought that if something was willfully and spitefully removed so that nobody could ever use it, that would be limiting freedoms.
Huh? By copying something, I am not removing it. Or are you claiming that without copyright, there would be no creation? Because the Free Software world and the pre-copyright era disprove that easily.
Well, guess I was wrong. I suppose I should just go and do some looting now. There's a nice new couch I would love to have, and I don't have to pay for it, because by your argument any money they require from me is limiting my freedoms.
Money is not the issue! Your freedom to punch someone ends in that person's freedom to not be punched. Your freedom to take a couch ends in the person's freedom to physical property. Your freedom to copy does not involve anyone else, and happens in the privacy of your own home - and no government must go in there!
Oh, wait a minute! I can't do that after all - because the freedom to acquire whatever you want was never guaranteed by either the American Constitution or the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms - the only freedom along those lines that was guaranteed was against having the property you already own unlawfully seized.
Everybody agrees that property ownership is a good thing. Few agree that information ownership, as copyright defines it, is a good thing - if that "information ownership" means controlling what occurs in the privacy of people's homes.
Interesting how when you're infringing somebody else's rights, it's moral, but when they try to claim or protect some rights of their own, it's immoral.
Rights, as you said, are not absolute, but defined by society. Everybody agrees that there is a right to ownership of property, and defense against having that property denied from you. Few agree that there is a right to limit actions of others, when they do not deny anything from someone else.
Amazing how denying somebody royalties on something they spent months working on because you downloaded it illegally instead of buying it at a bookstore is "not taking anything", and that "nothing is denied from the original author." Could have fooled me. I thought that authors needed to eat, but I guess I was wrong.
A profit the author would have made had the limitation on everybody's freedom taken place, is not something he has or ever had in that case, and therefore it is not denied from him. In order to have something denied from you, you must have it in the first place!
Any government-implemented limitation on freedom could be used to make money. I could make a law by which all who want to clap their hands must pay royalties to the guy who registered "hand clapping" at the "Movement gestures" department. What?! You are against that law? You want to deny the poor lad from his royalties for the clapping registration on which he worked months, sleeping at the government office at time?! Are you that evil? Why everybody can still clap their hands, they just need to pay him royalties to do so!
Amazing how a two hundred year old argument is used to justify illegal activity now. By that logic, nobody who hasn't been born into an aristocratic family should have the right to vote, because it was never written into the Magna Carta. After all, the original purpose of those rights was to protect the barons from abuses by the king. And if the origina
Second, copyright is not oppression of the many for the few. It is protection from oppression for the creative mind. I will grant that there are those who abuse it, but when I publish a book, story, or article and it is under my copyright, it protecting me from having my work stolen.
Copyright is a means to promote society by rewarding authors with temporary powers. The temporary powers are not the goal, but the means to the goal, and the constitution explicitly limits those powers to be temporary because they are considered a necessary evil. Stop saying copyright is there to protect authors - it isn't - its there to promote society.
Also, copyright infringement is copyright infringement, not theft. In every case of theft, an action of taking takes place, and something is denied from the owner. When I copy a work, I take nothing, and nothing is denied from the original author.
Third, copyright does not give the copyright owner to the right to determine how a work is used - only how it is copied (hence, "copy-right"). Not only that, but there is something called fair use, which allows for a copy of an excerpt so long as it is properly credited. So, you can quote from a book that I write, and it's perfectly legal. You can use the argument in a book that I write to prove that Dinosaurs ruled the earth a hundred years ago, and it's perfectly legal (albeit a bit silly). You can take an argument that I make, quote it, and use it to help you argue an extension, and it is perfectly legal. You cannot, however, scan the entire book into the computer and post it for free on a website. That's piracy.
Fair use is a limitation on copyright, because copyright was defined to create the bare minimum of limitation on people's freedoms while still creating an incentive to create works. In fact, "Fair Use" was the only way to use a copyrighted work in the early days of copyright. Copyright only limited publishers from creating copies, because ordinary users couldn't copy at all. It is not clear at all that the original constitution would have allowed for copyright if users could have copied works in whole at the time of its creation. That would probably be too severe of a limitation on liberty.
Fourth, and perhaps most important, you are mistaking a created work for "information". Freedom of information is perhaps one of the most important causes one can fight for. But a novel is not information - it is the blood, sweat, and tears of its author. A computer program is not information - it is the product of the time, effort, and problem solving skill of its author. The database that holds the numbers in the phone book is information - the program you use to access it is not.
There is no contradiction. A computer program is information. It was created with the effort of the author, but it is also information. A simple dictionary will prove that correct.
But I don't think you'll ever see that distinction - I've seen this too many times before. The minute you see the distinction, you can't justify the wholesale copying of books, music, movies, or programs anymore.
I already recognize that creations take a lot of effort to create, and still understand what the creators of copyright understood. That the effort of creating a work does not buy you a power to limit the freedom of all of society.
It's a sort of massive self delusion. But copyright infringement is still a form of theft - you're taking what is not yours, and doing things with it you don't have permission to do. It's no different than the burglar who breaks into your house and steals your DVD player so that he can pawn it the next day.
No, I am not taking anything, and I don't need permission to do whatever I want with the information stored on my computer, regardless of the amount of effort that took to create it. When a DVD player is taken: The owner of t
Unfortunately for your argument, copyright isn't about the creation of information either. It's about created work. The blood, sweat, and tears of the creator. It's about the implementation, not the data, in computer terms.
No, copyright was never about the authors or their sweat! Copyright was created to advance Science and Useful Arts, to promote it for society.
Statistics are information. Anybody can put together information. A book that an author spends months working on isn't. It is a created work. It takes talent and skill to make a created work.
Yes, it takes talent and skill to create.
To take your own example, if I create some software, who am I to say that it can't be distributed by somebody else? I'm the author of the f*cking software, that's who. I'm the one who spent hours getting it to work, and if I hold the copyright and I don't want it distributed in a certain way, it is perfectly legitimate and moral for my wishes to be respected. If my software solves a specific problem, it's perfectly fine for somebody else to come up with their own solution to that problem and release it however they want. They do not, however, get to tell me what to do with my solution.
That is just your opinion, that the right of the creator of information to power over all users of that information is more important than the freedom of all its users to distribute it and use it freely. Copyright is not supporting that opinion, and explicitly specifies that it is not there to reward or protect authors, but there to promote Science and Useful Arts, and society. It explicitly specifies that the copyright should last for limited times, not forever, in order to limit the necessary evil that is copyright. It was necessary in order to justify distribution costs and creation costs in the past - and it is not clear that it still is.
Why should the entire society be limited by copyright laws? Simple - to provide creative minds like myself with protection, so that we have the right to create what we want and do with it what we want. I'm a writer, and I decide what happens with my work, not some group of individuals who claim to represent "society". There is, however, a word for what happens when "the good of society" takes priority over individual rights and freedoms. Oppression.
Your individual rights and freedoms do not and should not include powers over other people's freedoms. Copyright is a government-based limitation on everybody's freedom, something that the whole of society pays for, and society should only pay for that if society sees the benefits. Rewarding authors in order to increase the amount of works and promoting society is what copyright is about, but my argument is that it is no longer clear that the reward is necessary for creation to take place. Your thinking that you should have the power to oppress everybody's freedom to use, modify and copy any work they have accessible is an illusion, not a right. Thankfully, the constitution that defined copyright explicitly agrees with me here, and disagrees with you. Unfortunatly, the large companies managed to bribe Congress into changing the law into unconstitutional form, and via New-Speak and large campaigns, shape sheeple like yourself.
Not being covered in the constitution is not the same thing as unconstitutional.
The US constitution explicitly defines what kind of laws the Congress can pass, and what kind of limitations on freedom are allowed. Everything not explicitly allowed by the constitution is disallowed and laws limiting freedom in such ways are illegal.
If you are the only person mass-producing it then yes. People buy stuff they can get for free all the time. Especially information.
When the discussion of changing copyright law comes up, people always bring up silly examples of people who for some reason have not heard of the law change, and get ripped off. My explanation here was that people would not be so stupid: They would know what is profitable and what isn't. They wouldn't distribute a work without copyright law, and expect a profit. And that is not a "ripoff".
And who pays you and your team of developers? Who decides what your time/effort is worth?
The free market.
In todays world, in the real world where we all live; it does indeed hurt people. It increases the amount of money I have to pay for software and it makes it difficult for smaller companies to compete as they don't have the resources (time/money) to protect their software.
When I copy their program, it does not hurt people, it does not increase the amount of money others have to pay and it does not have anything to do with the smaller companies who may have made it. Because I will never pay for a copyrighted program - for as long as copyright is a draconian and unjustified law - only kept alive by corporate bribes. If I copy the program or not - they cannot even tell.
If someone allows me to use their idea or knowledge with specific instructions on what I can or cannot do with it, then I am bound by an honor and moral code to follow those instructions if I want to use it.
You have funny concepts of honor and moral code. The exact funny concepts that the big corporations successfully shaped the public into with their New-Speak and huge campaigns.
We see and expect this type of behaviour all the time in forums and newsgroups and even here where there is a system in place to try to reign in people who can't follow the rules.
Nobody owns ideas and intellectual creations, people own a legal copyright to those. Nobody who understands the big picture about copyright will support it in its current form, and thus it is hard to respect that ownership. When I have a piece of information or idea, I am not morally or honorably bound to use it in any way or form - and it matters not what the original creator of that idea had to say about it.
Those who love creating already create. They don't need copyright to reward them. Copyright only serves to limit our freedom in the name of rewarding them.
And if they do, they surely don't need it to last forever - it must enter the public domain, that is the purpose of copyright.
My argument is not about research. Its about the creation of information and society's good.
Copyright is a limitation on people's freedom and as such must justify itself with positive consequences. It no longer does that, not even in theory.
Preventing plagiarism is better done in other methods, much less restrictive on people's freedom.
If you create software and it is "co-opted" by someone who distributes it in his package (say, a Linux distribution), who are you to say he is disallowed? Why should the entire society by limited by copyright laws, so that you can control the distribution of your information?
When copyright was first invented, it was applied to written text, items such as novels and textbooks. It made sense to give authors new rights in order to promote progress.
Copyright was mainly created in order to discourage secrecy (allowing open content to receive legal protection), encourage creation, but most importantly help society at large by create a large pool of Public Domain works on top of which derivative works can be created.
Software is not static text, it's a means of providing a service to the user and it is quite a different beast. That is why I am against historical interpetations of copyright & how it doesn't/shouldn't apply to software. Software is more than text/ideas, it's a service (at least in my mind).
Maybe you mean that software is not only static text, but it is static text. Its not exactly a service to the user, but a mechanism that the user can activate. (A service implies involvement of the creator in the use-scenario, which does not exist).
I was trying to say that you need legal protection to be available to closed source companies which allows them to set limits and terms on the software they make. This could be covered by contract law, such as NDAs in the example of in-house software which protects the sofware from being released to the outside world, but you end up with the same thing anyways: a set of rules limiting distribution of binary software.
All laws and legal limitations are there to help society at large. If they harm society then they have no place in society. Those companies do need that legal protection to make the kind of profits they do (and in some cases, profit at all), with that I agree. That legal protection should only be given, though, if and only if it helps society more than it harms it. Limiting everyone's freedom to use, change and exchange their information and software, is severe harm - and it must justify itself.
Copyright on closed-source creations does not justify itself, because: A. Free Software proves that even without copyright and that limitation, the necessary software will almost always and for almost any purpose, be created. B. There are other means to give incentive and profit to software creators if the need arises.
Today, those rules are part of copyright law, maybe they should be a separate entity but I think the protection should be roughly equivalent to that of present-day software copyright.
Do you think that without closed-source software, without the copyright that allows it to exist, the world would cease to function, and software to run it would cease to exist?
I think it is obvious that this is not the case. It may be less obvious, though, that removing copyright would actually free up many programmers' time from creating closed software for money to create open software for money or fun. It would allow for increased efficiency in the creation of software (Closed-source encourages and even requires re-writing the wheel in every application). It would in fact not only give more Freedom to society, but promote the software we use as well.
Nevertheless, I think your proposals too extreme. Limiting copyright terms to five years would noticeably affect the creation of works (even the useful life of software packages can be greater than that!). A minimum term, in my mind, would be twenty-five years; and surely society would be the better for a term lasting the life of the original creator.
When a copyrighted piece of information is no longer useful, society cannot enjoy it. If society cannot enjoy it - then it has no reason to pay for it with the loss of freedom that is copyright. Copyright is meant to help society by limiting its freedom for a little while, and then allowing it complete freedom with the information created. Your basic premise here is that society should give up that freedom to enjoy nothing in return.
As a trade-off, the copyright should not be private property, but a right inherit in the creator, and cannot be traded. For actual creations of large companies and the like (software, frex, but not music), where the names of the original creators are not usually available, a term of fifty years would be acceptable in my mind, but I would be happier with twenty-five. (For corporate creations like movies where there's one major creator and myriad other minors, I propose the longer of the life of the major creator and twenty-five or fifty years to make it easier to ascertain when the copyright expires.)
No, the copyrighted information would be useless by then. 5 years would provide enough sales and enough incentive to create works. Any more is unnecessary restriction of people's freedoms.
'Cancelling copyright on [software]' would only give the greatest monopolies the more power. Imagine if anyone could use Word without worrying about licencing fees. All but five users would not care about AbiWord or OpenOffice.org! Microsoft could include whatever features and our power to object would be reduced.
No, Microsoft would have to freely distribute their software. So what is Microsoft to gain by incorporating AbiWord or OO.o features in Word? Increased amount of users? What do those extra users give Microsoft? Nothing. Many users would still care about AbiWord and OO.o because they want software Freedom, and they will only gain that having the source code.
Also, the GPL is reliant on copyright law to work.
But the GPL is only doing this in order to "fight fire with fire". Richard Stallman says he would not have needed or created the GPL if there was no copyright, and would gladly give up the GPL for a world without copyright.
I have no idea what (3) means. AFAIK (IANAL), EULAs are not legally enforceable anyway.
EULAs may be enforceable because in order to run the program, you need to copy it into RAM and such. This copying is inherently illegal unless given special permission. This permission is limited and given in the EULA. If copying the program into RAM is Fair Use then the EULA is not enforceable, but I believe it is not considered Fair Use, as absurd as that may seem.
As for (4), I do not understand how it fits in with (2) or (3). In any case, it has somewhere between buckley's chance and none of getting accepted by any legislature of the known world.
I mentioned several mutually exclusive options as possible alternative ways to act. I would prefer the simple solution of abolishing software copyrights altogether. But if they remain, then they should only be copyright-able if the source is disclosed in order to allow future derivative works when it enters the public domain, or the purpose of copyright is not achieved.
I partly agree. Their is no constitutional basis for unlimited copyright protection, but that doesn't make it illegal.
Unconstitutional laws are illegal.
I agree with the ideal here, but copyrights were not meant to help society at large, they were supposed to help the creator of the work get some of the fruits of their labors. Imagine a world without copyright where any corporation could take your idea from you and mass-produce it, thus cutting you out from any profit.
You are suffering from the exact misconception I am talking about. Copyright is meant to help society at large, not authors or creators. Corporations can already take my idea and mass-use it, unless I patent it. We were discussing copyrights, which are not about ideas, but about expression of information. I wouldn't distribute non-copyright-able information and expect profit, would I? If I were to make money from creation and authoring in a world without copyright, I would do it in a completely different model where I am paid for my time or for customizations for my software.
This is the same old, I can't afford it therefore I should be able to take it for free while others are paying (basically subsidizing my usage) for it. So even if you are not hurting the creator of the original (I believe you are), you are hurting your fellow consumers.
You are not hurting anyone by copying anything. You may be breaking their assumption of holding exclusive copying rights, but if you recognize that copyright is an illegal and immoral law - then that assumption is ill-founded in the first-place.
Gaining non-essentials at the expense of others is not IMHO ethically neutral.
Its not at their expense, it has nothing to do with them whatsoever and there is no causality effect between them.
Progressing art & science in a market system usually implies innovation, and innovation usually implies profit. Profit isn't necessarily a reward, though it could be used as such. Profit's function in an economic system is covering the costs & risks of future development.
Innovation does not usually imply profit. It may require incentive for profit, and that incentive may or may not require copyright. That is why it is so important to remember that the purpose of copyright is to promote Science and Useful Arts and not to reward authors. Rewarding authors is a mean to an end. The limited-time clause is also very telling, in that the founding fathers did not find it positive to reward authors via exclusive copying rights, but a "necessary evil".
Just because financial needs aren't the ONLY incentive, this does not eliminate the fact that people need money.
People need money, but copyright is not a law meant to give people money (see above).
Niche cases? Those niche cases would be where someone spends 8 hours a day developing software, and thus don't have time to make money in exchange for another form of labour? That's a strange definition of niche.
The vast amounts of existing Free Software prove that for non-niche needs, copyright is not a required incentive for creation. It is as simple as that. And note all this Free Software is happening today, when many programmers face the choice between: A. Writing copyrighted software for a good chance of making money. B. Writing Free Software in their spare time without a good chance of making money.
And many choose B! Now imagine how many would choose B when option A is not there, or yields substantially less money.
Is this the model you seek? Is that really superior to today's model? I wonder.
No, the model I seek is Free Software for the vast majority of software, and programmer or firm-for-hire for the rest of software which is not good enough in the Free Software world.
Most popular open source software today is subsidised by hardware sales, business consulting, support contracts, and advertising (IBM, HP, RedHat, OSDN, Google, etc.).... Is this sustainable if the hardware business starts to falter, or if the business consultants lose large deals?
No, most Free Software is not subsidised at all! The few top opensource projects are subsidised, but the vast majority aren't.
If closed-source software disappears, then suddenly a lot more companies will have a lot to gain from more and better Free Software, so prepare for high subsidies in such a case.
Hmm. You'll have to rethink that one, I think (a sole proprietor is a legal entity, you don't need to do much of anything to be one, and the legality of this would get very tricky).
I don't understand the problem in that case.
Copyright is about protecting copies. So what you're saying above, is it's free to pirate software (binary form -- no copyright) but not free to copy source code (it's copyright) if you're a legal entity.
No, binaries would be protected against copying, provided that the source is copyrighted. The idea is, though, that the binaries themselves will not be copyright-able.
Another thing: I can write software, and not distribute the source code. Period. Companies like Amazon.com and Google are pretty powerful because they offer a service and don't redistribute their code.
Indeed, I have no problem with that. Its just that they can't expect a copyright in such a case.
Are you going to force people to distribute source code? I find that unlikely give the values of nearly every European and American country about overt coersion to perform involuntary acts beyond paying taxes.;-)
There is no involuntary action involved. The idea is simply that copyright is granted if you provide source, or not if you don't. You are free to distribute just a binary, you just get no legal defense if you do that.
The constitution is not only a legal document and not a technical document. It contains information between the lines. This is typically called "The spirit of the constitution".
While ~150 years is technically a limited time, it is not limited in the spirit of the constitution. In order to understand the spirit of the constitution you must ask what the limitation in the constitution is about. The constitution came to guarantee as much freedom to "The People" as it could, and copyright limited this freedom. It is quite obvious that the "limited times" clause is about creating copyright just long enough to cause incentive for creation, but as short as possible.
The first copyright period was 14..28 years. With the accessibility of information and tools to create it increasing exponentially, the required incentive to create information is reduced. Thus, you would expect the copyright period to lower. Instead, we find that it only increases.
This is a violation of the constitution. Of the spirit of the constitution, which is just as important as the technical words within.
Actually, I don't see how you could allow source to be copyrighted but disallow copyright protection for binaries, since the binaries are at the very least a derivative work of the source, and thereby entitled to copyright protection that way.
They would be considered derivative works in the sense that you may not redistribute them, but they should not be copyright-able in and of themselves.
The idea that the content is visible so that others can learn from it
The idea is that not only can they learn from it, but also they can use it in raw form, when it enters the public domain. With software, this distinction is important.
You cannot force anyone to release an inhouse development, and you cannot force anyone to release source for any binary of his.
But you can grant copyright only to source code, and not binaries.
Copyright is not there to promote the development of functional software. Its there to promote Science and Useful Arts (And this is not an interpretation, it is in the USA constitution).
Here is the interpretation part: Promoting Science and Useful Arts means enlarging the public domain with works that will inspire and lead to the creation of derivative works.
Copyright on closed-source software does not inspire creation of any derivative works, and does not help the public-domain whatsoever. Therefore, there is no justification whatsoever to grant it copyright.
Finally, don't forget that the distinction between binary and source is only in your head. Assembly language may very well be the only source for some programs.
Assembly source code is valid source code. However, if one applies for copyright on a stripped-down version of the source code (either assembly or comment-less or obfuscated code), he is violating the spirit of copyright, and that is practical to find and can be made illegal.
In fact, it would even be quite easy to find (It is clear when programs are human-written, and it would be very suspicious if anyone releases a Word Processor written in Assembly).
As is often repeated, most software development is done in-house. If a company develops a tool for itself, do you really believe a competing company should be allowed to use that tool without the creator's permission just because it is in binary form? Even the GPL enforces terms on binaries.
In-house software does not need copyright protection, it simply does not need to be released. The GPL is a way to "fight fire with fire". Without copyrighted binaries, there would be no need for the GPL.
Contract law requires that you sign a document. Clicking I agree has no legal bearing.
Thus, if EULA's have any legal power, it is because you are disallowed from copying programs into RAM and run them due to copyright law. In order to be allowed to do this, you need explicit permission from the author. The EULA is that permission, but limited permission.
Most people have long forgot the purpose of copyright.
And no, folks, it is not meant to reward authors. Copyright has for a long time stood without legal basis (Violating the "Limited Times" clause), but for the last 20 years, its also violating its original purposes.
Lets restore the original copyright: 1. Limit all copyright times to the minimum required to pay back for creation costs (along the lines of 5 years). 2. Cancel copyright on functional information (such as software). The power it grants the copyright holder over its user, even in a limited time, is too great. Software creation, in most cases, requires little to no financial incentive, and in niche cases where it does, payment to programmers is still possible. 3. Allow copyright, but only apply it to inter-legal-entities copying. This would mean that EULA's have no effect (You really shouldn't need extra permission from the copyright owner to run the copy you bought!). 4. Disallow copyright of the binary-form of software and creations. Only allow copyrighting Software in source form (And yes, music in its "source" forms). This is because copyright is all about making the derivative works possible in the future, in order to grow society's information base. You can make derivative works from public-domain software source, but you cannot make derivative works from binary blobs, even if they go into the public domain. How does it promote Science and Useful Arts to create dead-end pieces of information?
Instead of getting stuck over word-definitions, let's talk about whether it is RIGHT or WRONG. Morally, ethically, legally. In all cases, it is WRONG.
Copyright for unlimited times has no basis in the Constitution, and thus it is legally wrong.
Copyright in the information age is restricting everyone's freedom far more than it promotes "Science and Useful Arts" which is its purpose. Copyright never goes into the public domain which means it limits society's freedom without giving back to society! Binary code is copyright-able, which means it helps only the copyright owner, and does not help society create derivative works in the future (which is, again, the purpose of copyright). Thus it is morally wrong, as well.
The question of whether to copy or not to copy, when paying for the copy is out of the question affects not the creator of the original, and thus it is ethically neutral.
No no, you read those definitions from a NewSpeak site, that is trying to get us to talk and think and shape our beliefs as they like. Except instead the government directly, those who do this are the large corporations.
Piracy as a word describing copyright infringement is a new word (invented by Microsoft?). Theft/Stealing is taking without permission. Copying is not taking. Thus, copying can not be theft or stealing.
Property can indeed include copyright, but not information. The creators of the copyright clause in the constitution said so. These days copyright is no longer constitutional as it is not of limited time, so it is in itself illegal!
You seem to be agreeing with what I say, only in a disagreeing tone;)
I agree with most of what you said except: The US Constitution dosn't even mandate "copyright". It's perfectly possible that there are different ways of protecting the writings and discoveries of authors and inventors so as to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" in the 21st century.
The constitution does say "give exclusive copying rights"...
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Intent that makes manslaughter -> murder, sure.
Thing is, there is no law against writing file-sharing software. There is no control of what people use it for, and it doesn't matter if you mean for it to be used for illegal purposes, if it is not you who are actually committing any illegal action, or soliciting it. Surely your intent in the matter is not equivalent to soliciting illegal action.
Oh we are so witty today, aren't we?
Every step towards enforcing copyright is a step back. People should be able to create derivative works and advance the state of the art, rather than re-reaching the state of the art in every work, because it is copyrighted for unlimited times. Copyright yields not only lack of freedom, but also inherent inefficiency.
Amazing how asking somebody to actually pay for something is "limiting the freedom of all society."
No, the payment is not the problem! I don't mind people asking for payment for whatever action that is requested of them. Its the limitation on the freedom after receiving a copy that I am talking about. I have no problem with someone demanding 1 million dollars for a copy of his information. After buying such a copy, my freedom should not be limited to use that copy as I wish, including helping my neighbor with it.
Now, I thought that if something was willfully and spitefully removed so that nobody could ever use it, that would be limiting freedoms.
Huh? By copying something, I am not removing it. Or are you claiming that without copyright, there would be no creation? Because the Free Software world and the pre-copyright era disprove that easily.
Well, guess I was wrong. I suppose I should just go and do some looting now. There's a nice new couch I would love to have, and I don't have to pay for it, because by your argument any money they require from me is limiting my freedoms.
Money is not the issue! Your freedom to punch someone ends in that person's freedom to not be punched. Your freedom to take a couch ends in the person's freedom to physical property. Your freedom to copy does not involve anyone else, and happens in the privacy of your own home - and no government must go in there!
Oh, wait a minute! I can't do that after all - because the freedom to acquire whatever you want was never guaranteed by either the American Constitution or the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms - the only freedom along those lines that was guaranteed was against having the property you already own unlawfully seized.
Everybody agrees that property ownership is a good thing. Few agree that information ownership, as copyright defines it, is a good thing - if that "information ownership" means controlling what occurs in the privacy of people's homes.
Interesting how when you're infringing somebody else's rights, it's moral, but when they try to claim or protect some rights of their own, it's immoral.
Rights, as you said, are not absolute, but defined by society. Everybody agrees that there is a right to ownership of property, and defense against having that property denied from you. Few agree that there is a right to limit actions of others, when they do not deny anything from someone else.
Amazing how denying somebody royalties on something they spent months working on because you downloaded it illegally instead of buying it at a bookstore is "not taking anything", and that "nothing is denied from the original author." Could have fooled me. I thought that authors needed to eat, but I guess I was wrong.
A profit the author would have made had the limitation on everybody's freedom taken place, is not something he has or ever had in that case, and therefore it is not denied from him. In order to have something denied from you, you must have it in the first place!
Any government-implemented limitation on freedom could be used to make money. I could make a law by which all who want to clap their hands must pay royalties to the guy who registered "hand clapping" at the "Movement gestures" department. What?! You are against that law? You want to deny the poor lad from his royalties for the clapping registration on which he worked months, sleeping at the government office at time?! Are you that evil? Why everybody can still clap their hands, they just need to pay him royalties to do so!
Amazing how a two hundred year old argument is used to justify illegal activity now. By that logic, nobody who hasn't been born into an aristocratic family should have the right to vote, because it was never written into the Magna Carta. After all, the original purpose of those rights was to protect the barons from abuses by the king. And if the origina
Second, copyright is not oppression of the many for the few. It is protection from oppression for the creative mind. I will grant that there are those who abuse it, but when I publish a book, story, or article and it is under my copyright, it protecting me from having my work stolen.
Copyright is a means to promote society by rewarding authors with temporary powers. The temporary powers are not the goal, but the means to the goal, and the constitution explicitly limits those powers to be temporary because they are considered a necessary evil. Stop saying copyright is there to protect authors - it isn't - its there to promote society.
Also, copyright infringement is copyright infringement, not theft. In every case of theft, an action of taking takes place, and something is denied from the owner. When I copy a work, I take nothing, and nothing is denied from the original author.
Third, copyright does not give the copyright owner to the right to determine how a work is used - only how it is copied (hence, "copy-right"). Not only that, but there is something called fair use, which allows for a copy of an excerpt so long as it is properly credited. So, you can quote from a book that I write, and it's perfectly legal. You can use the argument in a book that I write to prove that Dinosaurs ruled the earth a hundred years ago, and it's perfectly legal (albeit a bit silly). You can take an argument that I make, quote it, and use it to help you argue an extension, and it is perfectly legal. You cannot, however, scan the entire book into the computer and post it for free on a website. That's piracy.
Fair use is a limitation on copyright, because copyright was defined to create the bare minimum of limitation on people's freedoms while still creating an incentive to create works. In fact, "Fair Use" was the only way to use a copyrighted work in the early days of copyright. Copyright only limited publishers from creating copies, because ordinary users couldn't copy at all. It is not clear at all that the original constitution would have allowed for copyright if users could have copied works in whole at the time of its creation. That would probably be too severe of a limitation on liberty.
Fourth, and perhaps most important, you are mistaking a created work for "information". Freedom of information is perhaps one of the most important causes one can fight for. But a novel is not information - it is the blood, sweat, and tears of its author. A computer program is not information - it is the product of the time, effort, and problem solving skill of its author. The database that holds the numbers in the phone book is information - the program you use to access it is not.
There is no contradiction. A computer program is information. It was created with the effort of the author, but it is also information. A simple dictionary will prove that correct.
But I don't think you'll ever see that distinction - I've seen this too many times before. The minute you see the distinction, you can't justify the wholesale copying of books, music, movies, or programs anymore.
I already recognize that creations take a lot of effort to create, and still understand what the creators of copyright understood. That the effort of creating a work does not buy you a power to limit the freedom of all of society.
It's a sort of massive self delusion. But copyright infringement is still a form of theft - you're taking what is not yours, and doing things with it you don't have permission to do. It's no different than the burglar who breaks into your house and steals your DVD player so that he can pawn it the next day.
No, I am not taking anything, and I don't need permission to do whatever I want with the information stored on my computer, regardless of the amount of effort that took to create it.
When a DVD player is taken: The owner of t
Unfortunately for your argument, copyright isn't about the creation of information either. It's about created work. The blood, sweat, and tears of the creator. It's about the implementation, not the data, in computer terms.
No, copyright was never about the authors or their sweat! Copyright was created to advance Science and Useful Arts, to promote it for society.
Statistics are information. Anybody can put together information. A book that an author spends months working on isn't. It is a created work. It takes talent and skill to make a created work.
Yes, it takes talent and skill to create.
To take your own example, if I create some software, who am I to say that it can't be distributed by somebody else? I'm the author of the f*cking software, that's who. I'm the one who spent hours getting it to work, and if I hold the copyright and I don't want it distributed in a certain way, it is perfectly legitimate and moral for my wishes to be respected. If my software solves a specific problem, it's perfectly fine for somebody else to come up with their own solution to that problem and release it however they want. They do not, however, get to tell me what to do with my solution.
That is just your opinion, that the right of the creator of information to power over all users of that information is more important than the freedom of all its users to distribute it and use it freely. Copyright is not supporting that opinion, and explicitly specifies that it is not there to reward or protect authors, but there to promote Science and Useful Arts, and society. It explicitly specifies that the copyright should last for limited times, not forever, in order to limit the necessary evil that is copyright. It was necessary in order to justify distribution costs and creation costs in the past - and it is not clear that it still is.
Why should the entire society be limited by copyright laws? Simple - to provide creative minds like myself with protection, so that we have the right to create what we want and do with it what we want. I'm a writer, and I decide what happens with my work, not some group of individuals who claim to represent "society". There is, however, a word for what happens when "the good of society" takes priority over individual rights and freedoms.
Oppression.
Your individual rights and freedoms do not and should not include powers over other people's freedoms. Copyright is a government-based limitation on everybody's freedom, something that the whole of society pays for, and society should only pay for that if society sees the benefits. Rewarding authors in order to increase the amount of works and promoting society is what copyright is about, but my argument is that it is no longer clear that the reward is necessary for creation to take place.
Your thinking that you should have the power to oppress everybody's freedom to use, modify and copy any work they have accessible is an illusion, not a right. Thankfully, the constitution that defined copyright explicitly agrees with me here, and disagrees with you. Unfortunatly, the large companies managed to bribe Congress into changing the law into unconstitutional form, and via New-Speak and large campaigns, shape sheeple like yourself.
Not being covered in the constitution is not the same thing as unconstitutional.
The US constitution explicitly defines what kind of laws the Congress can pass, and what kind of limitations on freedom are allowed. Everything not explicitly allowed by the constitution is disallowed and laws limiting freedom in such ways are illegal.
If you are the only person mass-producing it then yes. People buy stuff they can get for free all the time. Especially information.
When the discussion of changing copyright law comes up, people always bring up silly examples of people who for some reason have not heard of the law change, and get ripped off. My explanation here was that people would not be so stupid: They would know what is profitable and what isn't. They wouldn't distribute a work without copyright law, and expect a profit. And that is not a "ripoff".
And who pays you and your team of developers? Who decides what your time/effort is worth?
The free market.
In todays world, in the real world where we all live; it does indeed hurt people. It increases the amount of money I have to pay for software and it makes it difficult for smaller companies to compete as they don't have the resources (time/money) to protect their software.
When I copy their program, it does not hurt people, it does not increase the amount of money others have to pay and it does not have anything to do with the smaller companies who may have made it. Because I will never pay for a copyrighted program - for as long as copyright is a draconian and unjustified law - only kept alive by corporate bribes. If I copy the program or not - they cannot even tell.
If someone allows me to use their idea or knowledge with specific instructions on what I can or cannot do with it, then I am bound by an honor and moral code to follow those instructions if I want to use it.
You have funny concepts of honor and moral code. The exact funny concepts that the big corporations successfully shaped the public into with their New-Speak and huge campaigns.
We see and expect this type of behaviour all the time in forums and newsgroups and even here where there is a system in place to try to reign in people who can't follow the rules.
Nobody owns ideas and intellectual creations, people own a legal copyright to those. Nobody who understands the big picture about copyright will support it in its current form, and thus it is hard to respect that ownership. When I have a piece of information or idea, I am not morally or honorably bound to use it in any way or form - and it matters not what the original creator of that idea had to say about it.
Those who love creating already create.
They don't need copyright to reward them.
Copyright only serves to limit our freedom in the name of rewarding them.
And if they do, they surely don't need it to last forever - it must enter the public domain, that is the purpose of copyright.
My argument is not about research. Its about the creation of information and society's good.
Copyright is a limitation on people's freedom and as such must justify itself with positive consequences. It no longer does that, not even in theory.
Preventing plagiarism is better done in other methods, much less restrictive on people's freedom.
If you create software and it is "co-opted" by someone who distributes it in his package (say, a Linux distribution), who are you to say he is disallowed? Why should the entire society by limited by copyright laws, so that you can control the distribution of your information?
When copyright was first invented, it was applied to written text, items such as novels and textbooks. It made sense to give authors new rights in order to promote progress.
Copyright was mainly created in order to discourage secrecy (allowing open content to receive legal protection), encourage creation, but most importantly help society at large by create a large pool of Public Domain works on top of which derivative works can be created.
Software is not static text, it's a means of providing a service to the user and it is quite a different beast. That is why I am against historical interpetations of copyright & how it doesn't/shouldn't apply to software. Software is more than text/ideas, it's a service (at least in my mind).
Maybe you mean that software is not only static text, but it is static text. Its not exactly a service to the user, but a mechanism that the user can activate. (A service implies involvement of the creator in the use-scenario, which does not exist).
I was trying to say that you need legal protection to be available to closed source companies which allows them to set limits and terms on the software they make. This could be covered by contract law, such as NDAs in the example of in-house software which protects the sofware from being released to the outside world, but you end up with the same thing anyways: a set of rules limiting distribution of binary software.
All laws and legal limitations are there to help society at large. If they harm society then they have no place in society. Those companies do need that legal protection to make the kind of profits they do (and in some cases, profit at all), with that I agree. That legal protection should only be given, though, if and only if it helps society more than it harms it. Limiting everyone's freedom to use, change and exchange their information and software, is severe harm - and it must justify itself.
Copyright on closed-source creations does not justify itself, because:
A. Free Software proves that even without copyright and that limitation, the necessary software will almost always and for almost any purpose, be created.
B. There are other means to give incentive and profit to software creators if the need arises.
Today, those rules are part of copyright law, maybe they should be a separate entity but I think the protection should be roughly equivalent to that of present-day software copyright.
Do you think that without closed-source software, without the copyright that allows it to exist, the world would cease to function, and software to run it would cease to exist?
I think it is obvious that this is not the case. It may be less obvious, though, that removing copyright would actually free up many programmers' time from creating closed software for money to create open software for money or fun. It would allow for increased efficiency in the creation of software (Closed-source encourages and even requires re-writing the wheel in every application).
It would in fact not only give more Freedom to society, but promote the software we use as well.
Nevertheless, I think your proposals too extreme. Limiting copyright terms to five years would noticeably affect the creation of works (even the useful life of software packages can be greater than that!). A minimum term, in my mind, would be twenty-five years; and surely society would be the better for a term lasting the life of the original creator.
When a copyrighted piece of information is no longer useful, society cannot enjoy it. If society cannot enjoy it - then it has no reason to pay for it with the loss of freedom that is copyright.
Copyright is meant to help society by limiting its freedom for a little while, and then allowing it complete freedom with the information created. Your basic premise here is that society should give up that freedom to enjoy nothing in return.
As a trade-off, the copyright should not be private property, but a right inherit in the creator, and cannot be traded. For actual creations of large companies and the like (software, frex, but not music), where the names of the original creators are not usually available, a term of fifty years would be acceptable in my mind, but I would be happier with twenty-five. (For corporate creations like movies where there's one major creator and myriad other minors, I propose the longer of the life of the major creator and twenty-five or fifty years to make it easier to ascertain when the copyright expires.)
No, the copyrighted information would be useless by then. 5 years would provide enough sales and enough incentive to create works. Any more is unnecessary restriction of people's freedoms.
'Cancelling copyright on [software]' would only give the greatest monopolies the more power. Imagine if anyone could use Word without worrying about licencing fees. All but five users would not care about AbiWord or OpenOffice.org! Microsoft could include whatever features and our power to object would be reduced.
No, Microsoft would have to freely distribute their software. So what is Microsoft to gain by incorporating AbiWord or OO.o features in Word? Increased amount of users? What do those extra users give Microsoft? Nothing. Many users would still care about AbiWord and OO.o because they want software Freedom, and they will only gain that having the source code.
Also, the GPL is reliant on copyright law to work.
But the GPL is only doing this in order to "fight fire with fire". Richard Stallman says he would not have needed or created the GPL if there was no copyright, and would gladly give up the GPL for a world without copyright.
I have no idea what (3) means. AFAIK (IANAL), EULAs are not legally enforceable anyway.
EULAs may be enforceable because in order to run the program, you need to copy it into RAM and such. This copying is inherently illegal unless given special permission. This permission is limited and given in the EULA. If copying the program into RAM is Fair Use then the EULA is not enforceable, but I believe it is not considered Fair Use, as absurd as that may seem.
As for (4), I do not understand how it fits in with (2) or (3). In any case, it has somewhere between buckley's chance and none of getting accepted by any legislature of the known world.
I mentioned several mutually exclusive options as possible alternative ways to act. I would prefer the simple solution of abolishing software copyrights altogether. But if they remain, then they should only be copyright-able if the source is disclosed in order to allow future derivative works when it enters the public domain, or the purpose of copyright is not achieved.
I partly agree. Their is no constitutional basis for unlimited copyright protection, but that doesn't make it illegal.
Unconstitutional laws are illegal.
I agree with the ideal here, but copyrights were not meant to help society at large, they were supposed to help the creator of the work get some of the fruits of their labors. Imagine a world without copyright where any corporation could take your idea from you and mass-produce it, thus cutting you out from any profit.
You are suffering from the exact misconception I am talking about. Copyright is meant to help society at large, not authors or creators.
Corporations can already take my idea and mass-use it, unless I patent it. We were discussing copyrights, which are not about ideas, but about expression of information. I wouldn't distribute non-copyright-able information and expect profit, would I?
If I were to make money from creation and authoring in a world without copyright, I would do it in a completely different model where I am paid for my time or for customizations for my software.
This is the same old, I can't afford it therefore I should be able to take it for free while others are paying (basically subsidizing my usage) for it. So even if you are not hurting the creator of the original (I believe you are), you are hurting your fellow consumers.
You are not hurting anyone by copying anything. You may be breaking their assumption of holding exclusive copying rights, but if you recognize that copyright is an illegal and immoral law - then that assumption is ill-founded in the first-place.
Gaining non-essentials at the expense of others is not IMHO ethically neutral.
Its not at their expense, it has nothing to do with them whatsoever and there is no causality effect between them.
Progressing art & science in a market system usually implies innovation, and innovation usually implies profit. Profit isn't necessarily a reward, though it could be used as such. Profit's function in an economic system is covering the costs & risks of future development.
;-)
Innovation does not usually imply profit. It may require incentive for profit, and that incentive may or may not require copyright. That is why it is so important to remember that the purpose of copyright is to promote Science and Useful Arts and not to reward authors. Rewarding authors is a mean to an end. The limited-time clause is also very telling, in that the founding fathers did not find it positive to reward authors via exclusive copying rights, but a "necessary evil".
Just because financial needs aren't the ONLY incentive, this does not eliminate the fact that people need money.
People need money, but copyright is not a law meant to give people money (see above).
Niche cases? Those niche cases would be where someone spends 8 hours a day developing software, and thus don't have time to make money in exchange for another form of labour? That's a strange definition of niche.
The vast amounts of existing Free Software prove that for non-niche needs, copyright is not a required incentive for creation. It is as simple as that. And note all this Free Software is happening today, when many programmers face the choice between:
A. Writing copyrighted software for a good chance of making money.
B. Writing Free Software in their spare time without a good chance of making money.
And many choose B! Now imagine how many would choose B when option A is not there, or yields substantially less money.
Is this the model you seek? Is that really superior to today's model? I wonder.
No, the model I seek is Free Software for the vast majority of software, and programmer or firm-for-hire for the rest of software which is not good enough in the Free Software world.
Most popular open source software today is subsidised by hardware sales, business consulting, support contracts, and advertising (IBM, HP, RedHat, OSDN, Google, etc.).... Is this sustainable if the hardware business starts to falter, or if the business consultants lose large deals?
No, most Free Software is not subsidised at all! The few top opensource projects are subsidised, but the vast majority aren't.
If closed-source software disappears, then suddenly a lot more companies will have a lot to gain from more and better Free Software, so prepare for high subsidies in such a case.
Hmm. You'll have to rethink that one, I think (a sole proprietor is a legal entity, you don't need to do much of anything to be one, and the legality of this would get very tricky).
I don't understand the problem in that case.
Copyright is about protecting copies. So what you're saying above, is it's free to pirate software (binary form -- no copyright) but not free to copy source code (it's copyright) if you're a legal entity.
No, binaries would be protected against copying, provided that the source is copyrighted. The idea is, though, that the binaries themselves will not be copyright-able.
Another thing: I can write software, and not distribute the source code. Period. Companies like Amazon.com and Google are pretty powerful because they offer a service and don't redistribute their code.
Indeed, I have no problem with that. Its just that they can't expect a copyright in such a case.
Are you going to force people to distribute source code? I find that unlikely give the values of nearly every European and American country about overt coersion to perform involuntary acts beyond paying taxes.
There is no involuntary action involved. The idea is simply that copyright is granted if you provide source, or not if you don't. You are free to distribute just a binary, you just get no legal defense if you do that.
The constitution is not only a legal document and not a technical document. It contains information between the lines. This is typically called "The spirit of the constitution".
While ~150 years is technically a limited time, it is not limited in the spirit of the constitution. In order to understand the spirit of the constitution you must ask what the limitation in the constitution is about. The constitution came to guarantee as much freedom to "The People" as it could, and copyright limited this freedom. It is quite obvious that the "limited times" clause is about creating copyright just long enough to cause incentive for creation, but as short as possible.
The first copyright period was 14..28 years. With the accessibility of information and tools to create it increasing exponentially, the required incentive to create information is reduced. Thus, you would expect the copyright period to lower. Instead, we find that it only increases.
This is a violation of the constitution. Of the spirit of the constitution, which is just as important as the technical words within.
Actually, I don't see how you could allow source to be copyrighted but disallow copyright protection for binaries, since the binaries are at the very least a derivative work of the source, and thereby entitled to copyright protection that way.
They would be considered derivative works in the sense that you may not redistribute them, but they should not be copyright-able in and of themselves.
The idea that the content is visible so that others can learn from it
The idea is that not only can they learn from it, but also they can use it in raw form, when it enters the public domain. With software, this distinction is important.
You cannot force anyone to release an inhouse development, and you cannot force anyone to release source for any binary of his.
But you can grant copyright only to source code, and not binaries.
Copyright is not there to promote the development of functional software. Its there to promote Science and Useful Arts (And this is not an interpretation, it is in the USA constitution).
Here is the interpretation part: Promoting Science and Useful Arts means enlarging the public domain with works that will inspire and lead to the creation of derivative works.
Copyright on closed-source software does not inspire creation of any derivative works, and does not help the public-domain whatsoever. Therefore, there is no justification whatsoever to grant it copyright.
Finally, don't forget that the distinction between binary and source is only in your head. Assembly language may very well be the only source for some programs.
Assembly source code is valid source code. However, if one applies for copyright on a stripped-down version of the source code (either assembly or comment-less or obfuscated code), he is violating the spirit of copyright, and that is practical to find and can be made illegal.
In fact, it would even be quite easy to find (It is clear when programs are human-written, and it would be very suspicious if anyone releases a Word Processor written in Assembly).
As is often repeated, most software development is done in-house. If a company develops a tool for itself, do you really believe a competing company should be allowed to use that tool without the creator's permission just because it is in binary form? Even the GPL enforces terms on binaries.
In-house software does not need copyright protection, it simply does not need to be released. The GPL is a way to "fight fire with fire". Without copyrighted binaries, there would be no need for the GPL.
Contract law requires that you sign a document. Clicking I agree has no legal bearing.
Thus, if EULA's have any legal power, it is because you are disallowed from copying programs into RAM and run them due to copyright law. In order to be allowed to do this, you need explicit permission from the author. The EULA is that permission, but limited permission.
Most people have long forgot the purpose of copyright.
And no, folks, it is not meant to reward authors.
Copyright has for a long time stood without legal basis (Violating the "Limited Times" clause), but for the last 20 years, its also violating its original purposes.
Lets restore the original copyright:
1. Limit all copyright times to the minimum required to pay back for creation costs (along the lines of 5 years).
2. Cancel copyright on functional information (such as software). The power it grants the copyright holder over its user, even in a limited time, is too great. Software creation, in most cases, requires little to no financial incentive, and in niche cases where it does, payment to programmers is still possible.
3. Allow copyright, but only apply it to inter-legal-entities copying. This would mean that EULA's have no effect (You really shouldn't need extra permission from the copyright owner to run the copy you bought!).
4. Disallow copyright of the binary-form of software and creations. Only allow copyrighting Software in source form (And yes, music in its "source" forms). This is because copyright is all about making the derivative works possible in the future, in order to grow society's information base. You can make derivative works from public-domain software source, but you cannot make derivative works from binary blobs, even if they go into the public domain. How does it promote Science and Useful Arts to create dead-end pieces of information?
Instead of getting stuck over word-definitions, let's talk about whether it is RIGHT or WRONG. Morally, ethically, legally. In all cases, it is WRONG.
Copyright for unlimited times has no basis in the Constitution, and thus it is legally wrong.
Copyright in the information age is restricting everyone's freedom far more than it promotes "Science and Useful Arts" which is its purpose. Copyright never goes into the public domain which means it limits society's freedom without giving back to society! Binary code is copyright-able, which means it helps only the copyright owner, and does not help society create derivative works in the future (which is, again, the purpose of copyright). Thus it is morally wrong, as well.
The question of whether to copy or not to copy, when paying for the copy is out of the question affects not the creator of the original, and thus it is ethically neutral.
You are wrong on all accounts.
No no, you read those definitions from a NewSpeak site, that is trying to get us to talk and think and shape our beliefs as they like. Except instead the government directly, those who do this are the large corporations.
Piracy as a word describing copyright infringement is a new word (invented by Microsoft?). Theft/Stealing is taking without permission. Copying is not taking. Thus, copying can not be theft or stealing.
Property can indeed include copyright, but not information. The creators of the copyright clause in the constitution said so. These days copyright is no longer constitutional as it is not of limited time, so it is in itself illegal!
It would be so cool if I could type:
"gg:String" and get the google search results on String.
Or:
"ggl:Blah" and go directly to the first match!
Or even add my own commands, all from my very own control center!
You could uninstall any kpart you want pretty easily, including the html parser.
Also you could uninstall kioslaves (http/etc).
Everything is uninstallable, its just that there's noone who would to uninstall it.
In the Free Software world, though, bundling is not a problem. (Anyone is free to re-bundle any package with his!)
You seem to be agreeing with what I say, only in a disagreeing tone ;)
I agree with most of what you said except:
The US Constitution dosn't even mandate "copyright". It's perfectly possible that there are different ways of protecting the writings and discoveries of authors and inventors so as to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" in the 21st century.
The constitution does say "give exclusive copying rights"...
Actually the founding fathers implied:
That copyright is there to promote science and useful arts, not to reward artists.
That it should be for a limited time (and they set an example at 14-28 years).
That it should be optionally removed if not necessary (The constitution allows it, does not require it).
Glad to see we are on the right track to a civilian uprising that will abolish copyright.
Eh... Perl is passe.
;)
You should join the rest of the world and learn Python instead