Yeah, that's something I'd vote for, and am campaigning for...
I'd settle for some kind of sensible reform to bring "intellectual rights" back into some kind of sane bargain with society for a limited-term monopoly privilege, not a "property right" asserted to be both a natural entitlement and effectively perpetual. That's also, I believe, the normal kind of platform asserted by a typical "Pirate Party".
Given the current state of play, however, I've become an abolitionist outright, on the basis that would be preferable to what we have now. It makes me very angry that to all practical purposes almost the entire cultural heritage of the 20th century, new AND old, is locked away from use by me for creative purposes by effectively perpetual "intellectual property rights", where works produced before my birth will NEVER be out of copyright in my lifetime - it wasn't supposed to work like that, the next generation was SUPPOSED to be able to freely build on and develop from the creativity of the previous generation, and in their turn benefit from a LIMITED period of monopoly rights.
Copyright law isn't working, not for me, and not for many others. It's being overturned, de-facto, by the available technology and the widespread contempt for the unjust law; doubtful if it will be overturned de-jure as you describe, I'd have thought, though maybe in 50 years time this will all look bizarre to the society of that day, and people will be trying to imagine how anyone could ever think in terms of "intellectual property rights"...?
And that's a lie too. You're not the owner. You agree with the license again and need to follow it to use free software.
Common misconception, that, and Windows installers that present the GPL for click-agreement tend to perpuate it.
However, there is NO NEED to agree to the license to USE Free software, and there is no contract and no obligation to anyone arising from the simple use of Free software. How could there be? You might have got it from a third-party, not from the maintainer, and anyway with Free software there isn't really any concept of an "official" maintainer, all maintainers are "unofficial" in a sense, and I do OWN the Free software that runs on my computer, in a very real sense - OK, it may be a non-exclusive ownership, as lots of other people own their copies (but not MY copy) just as much.
Community ownership is a perfectly sensible concept and works beautifully with Free software and copyleft licensing to enforce it, said licensing of course only kicking in when the software is redistributed, since otherwise redistribution would be copyright infringement, whereas private use and/or modification is not.
The thing to understand is that a Free software license such as the GPL is a GRANT of additional rights and copyright waivers in certain circumstances, it is NOT an "agreement" with anyone, and is not at all comparable to proprietary software EULAs.
you are theorizing that "M$" adds hundreds of dollars to the cost of a PC. Would you care to back that claim up for us? Do you actually claim that the $200 computer does not exist because of "M$"?
I actually read GP's post slightly differently, that at a hardware price point of $400 there isn't much room for software costs, e.g. if those were $50-$100. And that as hardware becomes ever cheaper, at a hardware price point of $200, there's even less room, it starts to be a bigger and bigger proportion of the total price.
When I was playing around a while back with an on-line configurator, not a big-brand like Dell, but that at least gave me the choice of Linux or Windows + Office then add in other proprietary software, I found you didn't need a lot of software for up to 50% of the price to be software costs, very often for programs where there is a decent free/libre equivalent for most users requirements. Probably those prices were higher than Dell might p[ay, but even so...
I went to the Art Institute in Chicago and didn't get so much as a raised eyebrow by anyone for any photos I took. If I'd used a flash, they would likely have complained, but I took close to a hundred pictures there without getting any complaints from security. Where did you get hassled?
In most cases I haven't had a problem taking photographs in an art gallery or museum, though flash photography is usually discouraged or banned and you will be chucked out, though not of course lose your camera or picture. Still pays to be careful, however, since it does vary from place to place, and I have seen photography explicitly disallowed with or without a flash.
When visiting Edinburgh a few years ago, the room with the Scottish crown jewels in had signs forbidding photography, and a security guard inside who kept barking "use and lose it" threatening to confiscate the cameras of any visitors who he thought might be taking a picture.
The funny part really was that nearly all the visitors had photographic equipment (photography being permitted everywhere else on site), and I couldn't help but wonder at his threats when it was obviously trivial to take photographs without the guard realising, and also to wonder how he would get on if he actually had tried to physically take someone's camera, as opposed to merely threatening it (theft? criminal damage, potentially, if he damaged it or deleted pictures?) and especially if he had tried to confiscate a camera only to find that no picture was taken, that he had merely mistakenly thought the camera was being used?
The difference is that physical property suffers from scarcity; if you enjoy the use and benefit of physical property, then it is denied to anyone else, and conversely if anyone else takes it away from you then you are denied the use and benefit of it. This is what property laws protect.
By contrast, ideas do not suffer from scarcity; if you have a good idea and another learns of it, by whatever means, then afterwards you have a good idea, and so does he; the utility of the idea is not reduced by being shared, and there is no scarcity nor can there be a "tragedy of the commons", quite the reverse any attempt to artificially restrict ideas leads directly into "broken windows" economics that hurt everyone.
By your reasoning, if I lost a DVD movie, I could steal another one from the store and it would be fair use because I already own it.
remains fundamentally dissimilar, as I pointed out.
Also, if you still had the original license key then that used to be viable, you could get another copy of the software by whatever means, and use your original and unshared key to make it work. If you'd lost the key (not impossible by any means) but needed to reinstall Windows on a previously working and legitimately purchased system (not uncommon by any means) then there's not necessarily anything immoral or unethical about using some other key or a hack in order to not pay again for something already paid once. The legality of that, of course, might be another matter!
In this brave new world of OEM versions, restore partitions (not even restore disks!), Genuine Advantage, non-transferable licenses tied to specific configurations, and so on, even ensuring you still have the original license key is not necessarily enough. Sooner or later you'll be stuck, and at best have to grovel to your vendor for permission to keep using the software you already purchased, if you're lucky.
At least with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 once I had my license key and retained it safely, I could always upgrade the old computer, even to the extent of effectively scrapping and replacing it, and keep using the original software I paid for, unless I thought a subsequent Windows version was actually good and useful enough to be worth purchasing in and of itself, with or without a new computer. If I needed a key and didn't have my original one any more, then there might be a possibility of transferring a license from elsewhere, perhaps from some other machine being decommissioned - and that is something I have done, albeit several years ago.
For me product activation and licensing restrictions alone are sufficient reason that Windows 2000 will be the last Microsoft OS I expect to install and use, and is one of the reasons why I now use Linux which comes with the genuine advantage of being able to install and reinstall on as many computers as I like.
By your reasoning, if I lost a DVD movie, I could steal another one from the store and it would be fair use because I already own it.
Bzzt! Wrong!
If you steal another one from the store, then the store has been deprived of a physical disk which they might have sold to another customer, or if not then they could bargain-bin it or (conceivably) even return it to the supplier for some sort of credit depending on their arrangements.
Download a replacement COPY of a movie which you already purchased and which was lost or damaged, and it's not obvious who or what is being deprived of anything. Maybe the film studio is being deprived of the chance of selling you (again) the movie you already purchased once?
Still copyright infringement, potentially, of course, but certainly not much like theft at all, and not noticeably different from recovering the movie from a backup made and stored safely when you first purchased it. How many times should we expect to have to repurchase the same content, in your world?
Parent is broadly correct, the only comment I'd make is on the budget for movies, where I wonder about whether it's possible for cinema showings/movie theaters to act as "live performance" as it were for films they show, i.e. for theaters to organise themselves in advance and under contract/by subscription to fund new movies, paid for at the box office. In other words, in a post-copyright world, to serve the same sort of function for movies that live performance concerts and touring would provide for musicians.
Comments that this model is like Socialism or Communism are wrong; there is a similarity, but the difference is that we are not talking about tangible property in limited supply. We are talking about intangibles which cost nothing to replicate or distribute, and which are therefore in infinite supply, which is why this model can work. This wasn't previously the case, content was always tied to physical expression in tangible/scarce media in the past, which is why 18th/19th century copyright made a kind of sense it doesn't any more.
Think about this; if physical goods was instantly replicable, Star-Trek style, at zero cost, then you might find not only that our ideas about property would be forced to change, but also that Socialist/Communist ideals might suddenly work in that context, whereas in a real world of scarce goods they do not. For digital content, however, there is no scarcity, and copyright is a wholly artificial scarcity imposed on that which makes our society poorer than it need be, as well as supporting a wholly artificial "industry" that does not in fact add value or generate wealth at all, however much money it handles.
I've been writing something along that line of thought: a thought experiment about the broken window fallacy and free culture.
For now it can be found here though it may change or be relocated, I haven't really figured out where is a sensible place to put it yet.
As has already been commented, it's not necessarilly valid to simply multiply out the individual probabilities as if all the elements were truly independent, since they may not be, and 15^13 is a very big number and an exceedingly bold claim to make. FTFA the chance of a random match between two people is stated as being about 1 in 1 billion, which is roughly what I've seen quoted before for the type of test currently used by the Forensic Science Service.
Now you throw in the effect of the Birthday Paradox, and what you'll discover is that in a population of 60 million people, such as the UK, you should expect to find roughly 3.6 million [*] people who share a profile with at least one other person. Or in other words, there's roughly a 6% chance that there's someone else in the UK with a profile that matches yours. Think about that - what it means is that a national/international database simply doesn't work, because it doesn't scale, even if the test is accurate enough to be (mostly) unique on the current database size.
[*] actually, compared to the birthday paradox, when the random match chance is very small and the size of the database is very large, it's very easy to calculate a good approximation of the expected number not unique. All you do is imagine picking two people at random from the population, the chance that they match must be 1 in one billion. Assume there are n profiles which are shared between two people, and it follows that:
1 / 1e9 = 2n / (population ^ 2)
i.e. with a population of 60e6 there will be 1.8e6 profiles shared between two people, for a total of 3.6e6 people. Discounting the number of triples and higher, of course, which isn't too important for this purpose because once you're starting to get triples "uniqueness " in the database has long since been lost!
The worst one I think is Adobe. They have an almost absolute monopoly over the fixed-format portable document market with their PDF viewing and creating software, yet they complain to the EU when MS tries to create its own format. That's like Standard Oil complaining about GM going into the gasoline business!
Really? absolute monopoly over PDF with viewing and creating software, when I have kPDF, xPDF, OpenOffice, PDFCreator, and on, and on, and on to choose from?
I don't freaking think so, just like I don't think I'm going to be running Acroread any time soon, even if it is available for Linux.
Which are your ideals regarding software. I want to be clear on this and make sure you see them as your ideals or do you see them as something else?
Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1).
Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3).
Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
See The Free Software Definition.
The GPL is a means to achieve and make irrevocable Free software in a world with strong copyrights, in effect by subverting copyright and turning it on itself. This is why "copyleft" is sometimes described as a "copyright hack". The GPL, however, is a means to the end, and is not the end in itself - ensuring that the four freedoms are available to users of software is the objective.
Well, I don't know what the technical legal terminology would be, but defacto it acts as a contract that you do indeed have to agree to to use GPL software. This conversation would not exist if Dlink could use GPL software without having to agree to the GPL.
It cannot be a contract, because it's unilateral. You can purchase or be given GPL software, and you need not agree to the GPL to use the software, nor does using the software constitute de facto agreement to the terms of the GPL. This is explained here: If I get some software under the GPL, do I have to agree to anything?. While agreeing to the GPL does not incur any obligations on you, neither is it required to use the software. This, incidentally, is one reason the GPL is very strong, as it is not like an EULA which purports to unilaterally bind you by the mere fact that you have received or use the software.
What does incur obligations, however, is redistributing the software, which is what DLink did. More precisely, it is not a GPL violation, but a copyright violation. By and large, redistribution of copyrighted works, including GPLed works, is not permitted in most jurisdictions today. The only possible get-outs are to not use GPLed code, and write one's own code, or to accept the validity of the GPL and comply with the necessary requirements of the license, such as those related to source code. If, on the other hand, one disputes the validity of the GPL, as DLink did, then we fall back to plain old copyright violation.
Right, in other words, the creator retains more control over his creation. That control comes directly from placing limits on the consumer of that creation.
Oddly enough, in some ways placing work under the GPL involves the creator giving up control to a wider community, especially if the maintainer accepts back improvements to the original also under the GPL rather than requiring copyright assignment to themselves before doing so. After a little accumulation, there are so many "authors" that the work can never be reclaimed or taken non-free, and the community can decide to take it away from the original creator by forking the project and assigning new maintainers. This is not common, partly because the creator generally knows it's possible, but it can happen, as with XFree86/Xorg and more recently Joerg Schilling's cdrecord tools being forked by Debian.
By contrast, the only freedom I see offered by the BSD license which is not also offered by the GPL is the freedom to deny further recipients the freedoms which the
I was very glad to see the GPL win here. Very very pleased, like that warm fuzzy feeling pleased.
As was I. Having said that, I do regard the GPL as a means to an end, a way of using present copyright and licensing regimes to achieve the four freedoms for software, or something close to it. Under other circumstances, the GPL might not be necessary at all.
My point is, the GPL is a contract that enforces the rights of creators over what they create. It is not meant to give license to everyone to freely do with the creation whatever they want, which is a view held by many people here. That view is wrong.
Well, the GPL isn't a contract, because it's unilateral, and it's not necessary to agree to it in order to use GPL software, though redistribution is of course copyright violation unless you comply with the terms required by the GPL to permit redistribution. That's why I point out to anyone who thinks that because it's open-source it isn't copyrighted and they should be able to do what they like with it that the corollary implied is that copying and redistributed proprietary licensed software must be equally OK (or not OK).
Why do people use the GPL over the BSD license? Why do they use a license at all?
The obvious reason to use the GPL over the BSD license is that you know your work can't easily be rolled into proprietary code, for someone else to profit from, without ever giving back anything to you or the community. That's made worse by perpetual copyright - it wouldn't be quite so bad if the improved source code would become available anyway in a few years time, and it might also be a disincentive to lift GPL code relying on proprietary/hidden source code to hide the fact, if the developers knew that their indiscretion would become publicly visible before too long.
I agree with the duration of copyright, but I would not back registration as such things, as we have witnessed in patent law, tend to favor those with money over those without. I'm a little concerned about the "ALL" non-commercial copying. For example, I don't think anyone should have a right to distribute a thousand copies of an album someone paid money to develop, even if they're not profiting off of it.
Copyright duration is an obvious injustice at present. The point of registration is to ensure that only what has potential commercial value is copyrighted. For example, not every email or other document would automatically be copyright, allowing "copyright infringement" to be used against whistleblowers, and work created without the thought of commercial profit could immediately enter the public domain, instead of requiring the creators to explicitly disclaim automatic copyright.
However, I would not want to see the registration process being controlled by a government organisation, like patents or like vehicle licensing, for obvious reasons about the way such organisations tend to become dysfunctional. Instead I would suggest a system of registration in private hands, where in order to bring suit for copyright violation it would be necessary to refer to the escrow deposit of the infringed work on a particular date. That would make it obvious whether it was still within copyright or not, and would ensure that the work became available at the expiration of copyright without being "orphaned" and lost if the original creator was no longer extant. The deposition of a copy of the work could be with a solicitor, for example, or with other organisations that might be formed for the purpose, a bit like the way domain registration works?
As far as permitting non-commercial copying, on any scale, the theory there is that it makes it very easy to justify pursuing commercial infringement vigorously. Under those circumstances, then, I'd suggest that every non-commercial copy made actually increases the commercial value of the work, by acting as free advertising
Abolishing copyright doesn't get the source into the hands of the people, though, only the binaries, and what use are they, as they can't be easily modified.
In a world without copyright, that turns out to be less of a problem than you might think, because it then becomes possible to redistribute annotated disassemblies, and creating source from the binary under those circumstances I'd suggest is ideally suited to the kind of wide-scale collaborative effort that's made FLOSS so successful - first simple disassemblies might be distributed, then people could annotate sections, even rewrite section by section in higher level languages, and you'd soon have source code, and probably surpass the original program while you were at it
All a bit messy, however, and that's why although I wouldn't mind abolishing copyright, as an alternative I'd also favour substantial reform, permitting the distribution of binaries protected by copyright (for limited duration) without source code, but only gaining that protection if a copy of the binary and the source code were deposited in escrow. That would build into copyright law GPL-like guarantees that the source code would become available to the public within a defined time, whatever else happened - and the commercial developer would have a few years (a) to profit from what they'd produced and (b) to develop new and enhanced and innovative replacement versions which they could copyright in the same way, continuing the cycle.
Where's the conflict between wanting people to be able to copy, modify, and redistribute what they receive, and supporting the GPL which manages to achieve the trick of achieving that for software in a world of strong copyright? The stronger copyright is made, the stronger the GPL becomes, and the more it can be enforced; conversely, weakening copyright weakens GPL enforcement but equally makes it less necessary. Given the circumstances we find ourselves in, with perpetual copyright and looming digital restrictions, the GPL is very necessary, including version 3 (though it needs to be carefully drafted).
Failing that, abolishing copyright entirely would, IMHO, be better than what we have now. Although I also believe that some relatively simple and sane reforms (described in another post in this thread) would be less disruptive; but if established interests and copyright holders won't allow that then maybe it will have to happen by revolution, with changing technology and easy social networking and filesharing making copyright unenforceable in practice anyway. That would be more disruptive, but maybe it's unavoidable, as organisations often don't react sanely to their business models being swept away by disruptive technological change.
If you think that DLink should be freely able to copy, modify, and distribute code released under the General Public License, then I have no issue with that. However, by the same token, that would make all filesharing legal, since it would overturn copyright. Again, I would have no problem with that, which incidentally would also (by and large) render the GPL unnecessary for software anyway, since in effect the four freedoms would be available without the legal contortions of the GPL required to achieve it in a world of software licenses.
Personally, I would suggest that some more moderate reform of existing copyright might be less disruptive, such as reducing the duration to a more reasonable span (say 7 or 5 years), requiring registration to assert copyright at all (with the deposition of a copy in escrow, in the case of software including full source code), declaring ALL non-commercial copying and redistribution to be fair use, and maybe one or two other minor details.
Indeed, under such a more enlightend regimen, I don't think I'd have anything against increasing and enforcing vigorously criminal penalties for unauthorised commercial infringement. Easy to detect and chase down a money trail, easy to quantify damage when there are actual sale values and cash to count, as opposed to counting fantasy damages of number of copies * undiscounted RRP, and futiley scapegoating ordinary members of society who generally have few resources anyway for doing something that's becoming perfectly normal and natural for 21st century society, connecting and sharing with friends in a Network Age.
Grandparent goes a bit too far, while some original production is of course necessary, middlemen and distribution can also add value, depending on circumstances, exactly as you describe:
While I have issues with Wally World, this is not one of them. Wal-Mart performs a valuable service: they stock thousands of items on their shelves that I really don't want to have to buy straight from the manufacturer. They handle some of their own shipping and distributing, i.e. moving stuff around. Sure, I could drive to another state to buy something from the manufacturer directly. I could also pay a shipping company such as UPS to deliver it for me. Or, I could go to a store that stocks it on their shelves (e.g. Wal-Mart) and have the convenience of a short drive from my house 24 hours a day to buy it.
... however, this makes sense for products which are physical and tangible - it's not clear that it makes sense any more for intangible products which can be distributed at effectively zero cost. That's pretty much there now, for music/mp3's, even videos and films, software, and pretty much anything reduced to digital form. There's no reason to ever remove anything from the catalog, all you need is a slick interface and decent search engine.
Thus there's no longer any value-add to being a middleman for a wholly intangible product - maybe for a version of that intangible with a nice pressed disk, a nice case and professionally produced insert, but then those tangibles are what you're really paying for, not the digital bits on the disk. Sure, it's disruptive technology, and there are established players whose business model is being wiped out - but that's normal, to find that the normal state of the world is to be changing, and it's counterproductive (and, in the longer run, pointless) to try and freeze everything like a fly in amber and imagine it will always be the same
I'm all for that! It would stop people from suing over GPL violations!
Indeed it would. The corollary, of course, you would then be able to copy and share software freely. So the aims of the GPL would be fulfilled for all software, and the GPL itself would no longer be necessary. The only possible fly in the ointment is obtaining source code if there is no GPL; however that's less of an issue in practice than it might seem at first.
Provided that the abolition of copyright also implied that copying and redistributing annotated and/or modified disassemblies of binary code could be done freely, then source code can be generated if necessary, even if not distributed by the original manufacturer. In fact I'd have thought it would be an ideally suited problem for open-source collaboration to deal with - the first person need only publish the raw disassembly, then further contributors could add annotation as the program was reverse engineered, recompiling/rewriting the original disassembly as they went.
Doubtless bugs would be fixed and sections rewritten in higher-level languages as the process occured, resulting in the open version exceeding the original manufacturers product, and potentially doing so rather rapidly! Without copyright, trying to make software non-free would be exceedingly difficult, and the GPL would become only a historical curiosity that was important once.
We can't write free software - but we can get multimedia stuff to work, if we pay for the license to do so. You can get your DVDs to work 'out-of-the-box' on Linux - just use Linspire. People who believe in the ideals behind Free Software won't (including me), but for those that are worried about 'losing the desktop', options are available.
However, as you concede, then it isn't Free software any more, because of the licensing, and we can't legally redistribute it to others as Free software (gratis/libre) while preserving those freedoms including the freedom to redistribute, amongst others.
"Intellectual property" licensing is morally and ethically wrong in a digital network age, and this is one of the symptoms of that. One treatment for it is Free software, another is Creative Commons licensing.
Another would be some serious copyright reform - I would even venture to suggest that no copyright at all would be better than the insane copyright durations and DRM licensing we're presently seeing, though there are more moderate ideas for sensibly limited copyrights (7 years, 14 years, no DRM, all non-commercial copying exempt, etc) that could conceivably also be workable.
I had been using Mepis for quite a while, and SuSE before that. I looked at Ubuntu/Kubuntu in earlier versions, but though I could see the potential I declined to go for it at that time; I have only now changed over to Kubuntu with the 6.06 Dapper Drake (Long Term Support) version, and all I can say is that to me it seems fantastic.
Everything I need "just works", pretty much, the only minor hassle, as usual with Linux, was getting non-free formats (DVD, MP3, Flash, Java, etc) working - but then there's EasyUbuntu for that and it's not very difficult anyway, just a matter of following instructions. Otherwise, it looks great, works great, and seems to be every bit a finished release ready to be used.
If Linux, with distributions like Kubuntu/Ubuntu/Xubuntu, carries on improving in usability, functionality, and reliability at the rate that has been happening then within a year or two there won't be anything to touch it. Vista will be doing well to be released at all by then, from what I can see!
It doesn't matter. People will upgrade to Vista anyway, because they will have no choice (assuming they want to play DRM'd stuff).
Not I, then.
I have no need of DRM'd material, I'd sooner make my own content together with other like-minded Creative Commoners, and I can live without any material that comes with digital restrictions strings attached.
... friend who hoses his Windows system every now and then. I reinstalled Windows (and no, he doesn't *want* any other OS on the machine)...
I won't do that any more, not for friends or family or anyone. Maybe for pay on a time and material basis at standard billing rates, but on no other basis, and they can take it to a shop at that rate and not bother me anyway.
If someone wants to leave Microsoft behind, then I'll help. But it doesn't help anyone to keep helping them hurt themselves. Tough love makes sense here - if someone doesn't want to leave their beloved but crappy Windows behind, that's fine with me, but they can fix it themselves or pay commercial rates to have it done professionally.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that's something I'd vote for, and am campaigning for...
I'd settle for some kind of sensible reform to bring "intellectual rights" back into some kind of sane bargain with society for a limited-term monopoly privilege, not a "property right" asserted to be both a natural entitlement and effectively perpetual. That's also, I believe, the normal kind of platform asserted by a typical "Pirate Party".
Given the current state of play, however, I've become an abolitionist outright, on the basis that would be preferable to what we have now. It makes me very angry that to all practical purposes almost the entire cultural heritage of the 20th century, new AND old, is locked away from use by me for creative purposes by effectively perpetual "intellectual property rights", where works produced before my birth will NEVER be out of copyright in my lifetime - it wasn't supposed to work like that, the next generation was SUPPOSED to be able to freely build on and develop from the creativity of the previous generation, and in their turn benefit from a LIMITED period of monopoly rights.
Copyright law isn't working, not for me, and not for many others. It's being overturned, de-facto, by the available technology and the widespread contempt for the unjust law; doubtful if it will be overturned de-jure as you describe, I'd have thought, though maybe in 50 years time this will all look bizarre to the society of that day, and people will be trying to imagine how anyone could ever think in terms of "intellectual property rights"...?
Common misconception, that, and Windows installers that present the GPL for click-agreement tend to perpuate it.
However, there is NO NEED to agree to the license to USE Free software, and there is no contract and no obligation to anyone arising from the simple use of Free software. How could there be? You might have got it from a third-party, not from the maintainer, and anyway with Free software there isn't really any concept of an "official" maintainer, all maintainers are "unofficial" in a sense, and I do OWN the Free software that runs on my computer, in a very real sense - OK, it may be a non-exclusive ownership, as lots of other people own their copies (but not MY copy) just as much.
Community ownership is a perfectly sensible concept and works beautifully with Free software and copyleft licensing to enforce it, said licensing of course only kicking in when the software is redistributed, since otherwise redistribution would be copyright infringement, whereas private use and/or modification is not.
The thing to understand is that a Free software license such as the GPL is a GRANT of additional rights and copyright waivers in certain circumstances, it is NOT an "agreement" with anyone, and is not at all comparable to proprietary software EULAs.
I actually read GP's post slightly differently, that at a hardware price point of $400 there isn't much room for software costs, e.g. if those were $50-$100. And that as hardware becomes ever cheaper, at a hardware price point of $200, there's even less room, it starts to be a bigger and bigger proportion of the total price.
When I was playing around a while back with an on-line configurator, not a big-brand like Dell, but that at least gave me the choice of Linux or Windows + Office then add in other proprietary software, I found you didn't need a lot of software for up to 50% of the price to be software costs, very often for programs where there is a decent free/libre equivalent for most users requirements. Probably those prices were higher than Dell might p[ay, but even so...
In most cases I haven't had a problem taking photographs in an art gallery or museum, though flash photography is usually discouraged or banned and you will be chucked out, though not of course lose your camera or picture. Still pays to be careful, however, since it does vary from place to place, and I have seen photography explicitly disallowed with or without a flash.
When visiting Edinburgh a few years ago, the room with the Scottish crown jewels in had signs forbidding photography, and a security guard inside who kept barking "use and lose it" threatening to confiscate the cameras of any visitors who he thought might be taking a picture.
The funny part really was that nearly all the visitors had photographic equipment (photography being permitted everywhere else on site), and I couldn't help but wonder at his threats when it was obviously trivial to take photographs without the guard realising, and also to wonder how he would get on if he actually had tried to physically take someone's camera, as opposed to merely threatening it (theft? criminal damage, potentially, if he damaged it or deleted pictures?) and especially if he had tried to confiscate a camera only to find that no picture was taken, that he had merely mistakenly thought the camera was being used?
The difference is that physical property suffers from scarcity; if you enjoy the use and benefit of physical property, then it is denied to anyone else, and conversely if anyone else takes it away from you then you are denied the use and benefit of it. This is what property laws protect.
By contrast, ideas do not suffer from scarcity; if you have a good idea and another learns of it, by whatever means, then afterwards you have a good idea, and so does he; the utility of the idea is not reduced by being shared, and there is no scarcity nor can there be a "tragedy of the commons", quite the reverse any attempt to artificially restrict ideas leads directly into "broken windows" economics that hurt everyone.
However, what was said upthread:
remains fundamentally dissimilar, as I pointed out.
Also, if you still had the original license key then that used to be viable, you could get another copy of the software by whatever means, and use your original and unshared key to make it work. If you'd lost the key (not impossible by any means) but needed to reinstall Windows on a previously working and legitimately purchased system (not uncommon by any means) then there's not necessarily anything immoral or unethical about using some other key or a hack in order to not pay again for something already paid once. The legality of that, of course, might be another matter!
In this brave new world of OEM versions, restore partitions (not even restore disks!), Genuine Advantage, non-transferable licenses tied to specific configurations, and so on, even ensuring you still have the original license key is not necessarily enough. Sooner or later you'll be stuck, and at best have to grovel to your vendor for permission to keep using the software you already purchased, if you're lucky.
At least with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 once I had my license key and retained it safely, I could always upgrade the old computer, even to the extent of effectively scrapping and replacing it, and keep using the original software I paid for, unless I thought a subsequent Windows version was actually good and useful enough to be worth purchasing in and of itself, with or without a new computer. If I needed a key and didn't have my original one any more, then there might be a possibility of transferring a license from elsewhere, perhaps from some other machine being decommissioned - and that is something I have done, albeit several years ago.
For me product activation and licensing restrictions alone are sufficient reason that Windows 2000 will be the last Microsoft OS I expect to install and use, and is one of the reasons why I now use Linux which comes with the genuine advantage of being able to install and reinstall on as many computers as I like.
Bzzt! Wrong!
If you steal another one from the store, then the store has been deprived of a physical disk which they might have sold to another customer, or if not then they could bargain-bin it or (conceivably) even return it to the supplier for some sort of credit depending on their arrangements.
Download a replacement COPY of a movie which you already purchased and which was lost or damaged, and it's not obvious who or what is being deprived of anything. Maybe the film studio is being deprived of the chance of selling you (again) the movie you already purchased once?
Still copyright infringement, potentially, of course, but certainly not much like theft at all, and not noticeably different from recovering the movie from a backup made and stored safely when you first purchased it. How many times should we expect to have to repurchase the same content, in your world?
Parent is broadly correct, the only comment I'd make is on the budget for movies, where I wonder about whether it's possible for cinema showings/movie theaters to act as "live performance" as it were for films they show, i.e. for theaters to organise themselves in advance and under contract/by subscription to fund new movies, paid for at the box office. In other words, in a post-copyright world, to serve the same sort of function for movies that live performance concerts and touring would provide for musicians.
Comments that this model is like Socialism or Communism are wrong; there is a similarity, but the difference is that we are not talking about tangible property in limited supply. We are talking about intangibles which cost nothing to replicate or distribute, and which are therefore in infinite supply, which is why this model can work. This wasn't previously the case, content was always tied to physical expression in tangible/scarce media in the past, which is why 18th/19th century copyright made a kind of sense it doesn't any more.
Think about this; if physical goods was instantly replicable, Star-Trek style, at zero cost, then you might find not only that our ideas about property would be forced to change, but also that Socialist/Communist ideals might suddenly work in that context, whereas in a real world of scarce goods they do not. For digital content, however, there is no scarcity, and copyright is a wholly artificial scarcity imposed on that which makes our society poorer than it need be, as well as supporting a wholly artificial "industry" that does not in fact add value or generate wealth at all, however much money it handles.
I've been writing something along that line of thought: a thought experiment about the broken window fallacy and free culture. For now it can be found here though it may change or be relocated, I haven't really figured out where is a sensible place to put it yet.
As has already been commented, it's not necessarilly valid to simply multiply out the individual probabilities as if all the elements were truly independent, since they may not be, and 15^13 is a very big number and an exceedingly bold claim to make. FTFA the chance of a random match between two people is stated as being about 1 in 1 billion, which is roughly what I've seen quoted before for the type of test currently used by the Forensic Science Service.
Now you throw in the effect of the Birthday Paradox, and what you'll discover is that in a population of 60 million people, such as the UK, you should expect to find roughly 3.6 million [*] people who share a profile with at least one other person. Or in other words, there's roughly a 6% chance that there's someone else in the UK with a profile that matches yours. Think about that - what it means is that a national/international database simply doesn't work, because it doesn't scale, even if the test is accurate enough to be (mostly) unique on the current database size.
[*] actually, compared to the birthday paradox, when the random match chance is very small and the size of the database is very large, it's very easy to calculate a good approximation of the expected number not unique. All you do is imagine picking two people at random from the population, the chance that they match must be 1 in one billion. Assume there are n profiles which are shared between two people, and it follows that:
i.e. with a population of 60e6 there will be 1.8e6 profiles shared between two people, for a total of 3.6e6 people. Discounting the number of triples and higher, of course, which isn't too important for this purpose because once you're starting to get triples "uniqueness " in the database has long since been lost!
I downloaded this for that purpose. I hear some people also report good results with this and with this, as well.
Your mileage may vary, of course.
Really? absolute monopoly over PDF with viewing and creating software, when I have kPDF, xPDF, OpenOffice, PDFCreator, and on, and on, and on to choose from?
I don't freaking think so, just like I don't think I'm going to be running Acroread any time soon, even if it is available for Linux.
Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:
Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
See The Free Software Definition.
The GPL is a means to achieve and make irrevocable Free software in a world with strong copyrights, in effect by subverting copyright and turning it on itself. This is why "copyleft" is sometimes described as a "copyright hack". The GPL, however, is a means to the end, and is not the end in itself - ensuring that the four freedoms are available to users of software is the objective.
It cannot be a contract, because it's unilateral. You can purchase or be given GPL software, and you need not agree to the GPL to use the software, nor does using the software constitute de facto agreement to the terms of the GPL. This is explained here: If I get some software under the GPL, do I have to agree to anything?. While agreeing to the GPL does not incur any obligations on you, neither is it required to use the software. This, incidentally, is one reason the GPL is very strong, as it is not like an EULA which purports to unilaterally bind you by the mere fact that you have received or use the software.
What does incur obligations, however, is redistributing the software, which is what DLink did. More precisely, it is not a GPL violation, but a copyright violation. By and large, redistribution of copyrighted works, including GPLed works, is not permitted in most jurisdictions today. The only possible get-outs are to not use GPLed code, and write one's own code, or to accept the validity of the GPL and comply with the necessary requirements of the license, such as those related to source code. If, on the other hand, one disputes the validity of the GPL, as DLink did, then we fall back to plain old copyright violation.
Oddly enough, in some ways placing work under the GPL involves the creator giving up control to a wider community, especially if the maintainer accepts back improvements to the original also under the GPL rather than requiring copyright assignment to themselves before doing so. After a little accumulation, there are so many "authors" that the work can never be reclaimed or taken non-free, and the community can decide to take it away from the original creator by forking the project and assigning new maintainers. This is not common, partly because the creator generally knows it's possible, but it can happen, as with XFree86/Xorg and more recently Joerg Schilling's cdrecord tools being forked by Debian.
By contrast, the only freedom I see offered by the BSD license which is not also offered by the GPL is the freedom to deny further recipients the freedoms which the
As was I. Having said that, I do regard the GPL as a means to an end, a way of using present copyright and licensing regimes to achieve the four freedoms for software, or something close to it. Under other circumstances, the GPL might not be necessary at all.
Well, the GPL isn't a contract, because it's unilateral, and it's not necessary to agree to it in order to use GPL software, though redistribution is of course copyright violation unless you comply with the terms required by the GPL to permit redistribution. That's why I point out to anyone who thinks that because it's open-source it isn't copyrighted and they should be able to do what they like with it that the corollary implied is that copying and redistributed proprietary licensed software must be equally OK (or not OK).
The obvious reason to use the GPL over the BSD license is that you know your work can't easily be rolled into proprietary code, for someone else to profit from, without ever giving back anything to you or the community. That's made worse by perpetual copyright - it wouldn't be quite so bad if the improved source code would become available anyway in a few years time, and it might also be a disincentive to lift GPL code relying on proprietary/hidden source code to hide the fact, if the developers knew that their indiscretion would become publicly visible before too long.
Copyright duration is an obvious injustice at present. The point of registration is to ensure that only what has potential commercial value is copyrighted. For example, not every email or other document would automatically be copyright, allowing "copyright infringement" to be used against whistleblowers, and work created without the thought of commercial profit could immediately enter the public domain, instead of requiring the creators to explicitly disclaim automatic copyright.
However, I would not want to see the registration process being controlled by a government organisation, like patents or like vehicle licensing, for obvious reasons about the way such organisations tend to become dysfunctional. Instead I would suggest a system of registration in private hands, where in order to bring suit for copyright violation it would be necessary to refer to the escrow deposit of the infringed work on a particular date. That would make it obvious whether it was still within copyright or not, and would ensure that the work became available at the expiration of copyright without being "orphaned" and lost if the original creator was no longer extant. The deposition of a copy of the work could be with a solicitor, for example, or with other organisations that might be formed for the purpose, a bit like the way domain registration works?
As far as permitting non-commercial copying, on any scale, the theory there is that it makes it very easy to justify pursuing commercial infringement vigorously. Under those circumstances, then, I'd suggest that every non-commercial copy made actually increases the commercial value of the work, by acting as free advertising
In a world without copyright, that turns out to be less of a problem than you might think, because it then becomes possible to redistribute annotated disassemblies, and creating source from the binary under those circumstances I'd suggest is ideally suited to the kind of wide-scale collaborative effort that's made FLOSS so successful - first simple disassemblies might be distributed, then people could annotate sections, even rewrite section by section in higher level languages, and you'd soon have source code, and probably surpass the original program while you were at it
All a bit messy, however, and that's why although I wouldn't mind abolishing copyright, as an alternative I'd also favour substantial reform, permitting the distribution of binaries protected by copyright (for limited duration) without source code, but only gaining that protection if a copy of the binary and the source code were deposited in escrow. That would build into copyright law GPL-like guarantees that the source code would become available to the public within a defined time, whatever else happened - and the commercial developer would have a few years (a) to profit from what they'd produced and (b) to develop new and enhanced and innovative replacement versions which they could copyright in the same way, continuing the cycle.
Where's the conflict between wanting people to be able to copy, modify, and redistribute what they receive, and supporting the GPL which manages to achieve the trick of achieving that for software in a world of strong copyright? The stronger copyright is made, the stronger the GPL becomes, and the more it can be enforced; conversely, weakening copyright weakens GPL enforcement but equally makes it less necessary. Given the circumstances we find ourselves in, with perpetual copyright and looming digital restrictions, the GPL is very necessary, including version 3 (though it needs to be carefully drafted).
Failing that, abolishing copyright entirely would, IMHO, be better than what we have now. Although I also believe that some relatively simple and sane reforms (described in another post in this thread) would be less disruptive; but if established interests and copyright holders won't allow that then maybe it will have to happen by revolution, with changing technology and easy social networking and filesharing making copyright unenforceable in practice anyway. That would be more disruptive, but maybe it's unavoidable, as organisations often don't react sanely to their business models being swept away by disruptive technological change.
If you think that DLink should be freely able to copy, modify, and distribute code released under the General Public License, then I have no issue with that. However, by the same token, that would make all filesharing legal, since it would overturn copyright. Again, I would have no problem with that, which incidentally would also (by and large) render the GPL unnecessary for software anyway, since in effect the four freedoms would be available without the legal contortions of the GPL required to achieve it in a world of software licenses.
Personally, I would suggest that some more moderate reform of existing copyright might be less disruptive, such as reducing the duration to a more reasonable span (say 7 or 5 years), requiring registration to assert copyright at all (with the deposition of a copy in escrow, in the case of software including full source code), declaring ALL non-commercial copying and redistribution to be fair use, and maybe one or two other minor details.
Indeed, under such a more enlightend regimen, I don't think I'd have anything against increasing and enforcing vigorously criminal penalties for unauthorised commercial infringement. Easy to detect and chase down a money trail, easy to quantify damage when there are actual sale values and cash to count, as opposed to counting fantasy damages of number of copies * undiscounted RRP, and futiley scapegoating ordinary members of society who generally have few resources anyway for doing something that's becoming perfectly normal and natural for 21st century society, connecting and sharing with friends in a Network Age.
Grandparent goes a bit too far, while some original production is of course necessary, middlemen and distribution can also add value, depending on circumstances, exactly as you describe:
... however, this makes sense for products which are physical and tangible - it's not clear that it makes sense any more for intangible products which can be distributed at effectively zero cost. That's pretty much there now, for music/mp3's, even videos and films, software, and pretty much anything reduced to digital form. There's no reason to ever remove anything from the catalog, all you need is a slick interface and decent search engine.
Thus there's no longer any value-add to being a middleman for a wholly intangible product - maybe for a version of that intangible with a nice pressed disk, a nice case and professionally produced insert, but then those tangibles are what you're really paying for, not the digital bits on the disk. Sure, it's disruptive technology, and there are established players whose business model is being wiped out - but that's normal, to find that the normal state of the world is to be changing, and it's counterproductive (and, in the longer run, pointless) to try and freeze everything like a fly in amber and imagine it will always be the same
Indeed it would. The corollary, of course, you would then be able to copy and share software freely. So the aims of the GPL would be fulfilled for all software, and the GPL itself would no longer be necessary. The only possible fly in the ointment is obtaining source code if there is no GPL; however that's less of an issue in practice than it might seem at first.
Provided that the abolition of copyright also implied that copying and redistributing annotated and/or modified disassemblies of binary code could be done freely, then source code can be generated if necessary, even if not distributed by the original manufacturer. In fact I'd have thought it would be an ideally suited problem for open-source collaboration to deal with - the first person need only publish the raw disassembly, then further contributors could add annotation as the program was reverse engineered, recompiling/rewriting the original disassembly as they went.
Doubtless bugs would be fixed and sections rewritten in higher-level languages as the process occured, resulting in the open version exceeding the original manufacturers product, and potentially doing so rather rapidly! Without copyright, trying to make software non-free would be exceedingly difficult, and the GPL would become only a historical curiosity that was important once.
The university where I studied has created plagiarism detection software for this reason, which is called Ferret.
However, as you concede, then it isn't Free software any more, because of the licensing, and we can't legally redistribute it to others as Free software (gratis/libre) while preserving those freedoms including the freedom to redistribute, amongst others.
"Intellectual property" licensing is morally and ethically wrong in a digital network age, and this is one of the symptoms of that. One treatment for it is Free software, another is Creative Commons licensing.
Another would be some serious copyright reform - I would even venture to suggest that no copyright at all would be better than the insane copyright durations and DRM licensing we're presently seeing, though there are more moderate ideas for sensibly limited copyrights (7 years, 14 years, no DRM, all non-commercial copying exempt, etc) that could conceivably also be workable.
I had been using Mepis for quite a while, and SuSE before that. I looked at Ubuntu/Kubuntu in earlier versions, but though I could see the potential I declined to go for it at that time; I have only now changed over to Kubuntu with the 6.06 Dapper Drake (Long Term Support) version, and all I can say is that to me it seems fantastic.
Everything I need "just works", pretty much, the only minor hassle, as usual with Linux, was getting non-free formats (DVD, MP3, Flash, Java, etc) working - but then there's EasyUbuntu for that and it's not very difficult anyway, just a matter of following instructions. Otherwise, it looks great, works great, and seems to be every bit a finished release ready to be used.
If Linux, with distributions like Kubuntu/Ubuntu/Xubuntu, carries on improving in usability, functionality, and reliability at the rate that has been happening then within a year or two there won't be anything to touch it. Vista will be doing well to be released at all by then, from what I can see!
I don't experience any of these problems with Kubuntu.
Not I, then.
I have no need of DRM'd material, I'd sooner make my own content together with other like-minded Creative Commoners, and I can live without any material that comes with digital restrictions strings attached.
If that makes me a latter-day Amish, so be it.
I won't do that any more, not for friends or family or anyone. Maybe for pay on a time and material basis at standard billing rates, but on no other basis, and they can take it to a shop at that rate and not bother me anyway.
If someone wants to leave Microsoft behind, then I'll help. But it doesn't help anyone to keep helping them hurt themselves. Tough love makes sense here - if someone doesn't want to leave their beloved but crappy Windows behind, that's fine with me, but they can fix it themselves or pay commercial rates to have it done professionally.