With freedom of speech (At least the American ideal) you should be able to state your views without getting arrested for it. But it doesn't state that you can say it without anyone knowing that you said it.
Oh?
The Supreme Court ruled today that an ordinance requiring door-to-door petitioners to obtain a permit and identify themselves upon demand violates the right of anonymity inherent in the First Amendment freedom of speech. [link]
The First Amendment, said the court, protects the anonymity of Internet speech. It called anonymous speech a "great tradition that is woven into the fabric of this nation's history," and added that "the ability to speak one's mind on the Internet without the burden of the other party knowing all the facts about one's identity can foster open communication and robust debate." [link]
Privacy, of which anonymity is a part, is vital in protecting freedom of speech. If you have something controversial to say, you may still be effectively restrained from saying it if you know that it'll attract suspicion from your fellow citizens or the government. For example, a business owner who has some kooky political views might not be able to discuss them if such discussion can be traced back to him, because he'll risk a boycott from customers who disagree. Should he have to choose between political speech and his own livelihood?
What astounds me about this, however, is just how many people go out of their way to be searched. If the cops don't call you over to be searched you don't have to stop- I've walked past every time without being stopped. Some people, however, walk over to the cops, open their bags and show them the contents without being asked.
You know... if you were a terrorist, isn't that exactly what you'd do? Get your buddy to distract the cops by showing them his bag while you walk on to the subway with the bomb in your bag.
iPod plays mp3s. Anyone who's willing to sell me an mp3, or something I can turn into an mp3, can provide me with a product that plays on my iPod. Where's the lock-in?
OK, wise guy. If selling MP3s of songs people actually want is such a feasible business, how come Apple isn't doing it themselves? They could sell non-DRM'd popular music just as easily as Real, Napster, or any other music store, and then they'd be able to sell their music files to everyone with an MP3 player, not just iPod owners. What a shocking coincidence that none of those actually do it!
Are you forgetting the army of lawyers they would have? I doubt you could afford to defend yourself.
This is hardly a new or unique problem. A malicious company could sue you for anything and you'd have trouble defending yourself against their army of lawyers. They could point to some random page on your site, claim it used to be on theirs, and sue you for infringing a copyright on a page they never even had on their own site. How would you prove they didn't write it for their site first, then take it down without leaving a trace? It sucks, but it has nothing to do with the matter at hand.
The fact is, if you actually wrote something first, and they put it up on their site after copying it from yours, it typically isn't hard to prove you had it first.
It still takes time to write the piece, so cost of duplication is irrelevant
That time has already been sunk. It doesn't take you any longer to write a page when someone else puts it up on their site.
Ask as many high school students as you can get your hands on what they think of current issues and whom they feel best suits their needs. Most of them respond that they don't know, don't care, or are inclined to vote the way their parents or teachers tell them to.
And why should they care? They can't vote, so they have no reason to look into candidates, just as I have no reason to research the issues and candidates in the UK or Canada. If they could vote, however, then I guarantee they'd show more interest.
Kids also tend to be on the naive side. They haven't been burned before so they ignore the fine print and concentrate on the too-good-to-be-true offer.
As you point out yourself, the problem there is lack of experience, not age. You can't expect someone to gain experience with decisions like this if you aren't going to let him make those decisions.
What about a will? Living will? Prenupital agreement? Marriage contract? Mortgage? How many 16 year olds do you know responsible and informed enough to enter fully into all of those agreements?
How many 25 year olds do you know who are responsible and informed enough to enter fully into all of those agreements? Hell, how many 40 year olds?
Let me put it this way: if I can introduce you to a person, and you can tell me--after taking as much time as you need--whether or not that person is responsible and informed enough to make some decision, then you'll be the first person I've ever met who can do so.
The fact is, people throw around terms like "responsible enough" and "mature enough" without having the slightest clue about what it actually means to be mature enough to make whatever decision they're talking about. If you can't make that judgment about an individual, there's no way you can make it about an entire age group.
On the other hand, if you can make that judgment about individuals, then there's no need for an age limit in the first place!
What happens when they sue you for copyright infringement?
If they had the chutzpah to do that, it wouldn't be hard to show that the article was up on your own site first. You could point to a cached version at Google or the Wayback Machine, for example.
That's why copyright is important - when the cost of duplication is zero, the only way to stop someone from ripping off your work is with a legal club.
When the cost of duplication is zero, it doesn't make much sense to talk about "ripping off". The copy that's on a newspaper's web site doesn't detract from the copy that's on your own web site.
It is important to give credit, and to that effect I believe anti-fraud laws should be enforced against plagiarists, but that's it.
Let's face it, the world we live in today is different than the world of yesterday. Kids don't grow up as quickly because they're not put to work to support their families at 13 years of age.
BS. Kids are the same as they've always been. Although the economic conditions have changed, that hasn't done a thing to make kids any less mature in the sense of being able to handle "adult" content.
The fact is, sexual and violent media isn't harmful, and people who claim that it's inappropriate for minors are almost always trying to cover up their disdain for the material in general. They just latch on to the "won't someone think of the children?" line because it's one that a lot of people don't question. If you say "it's for the children", then it seems you can disengage the minds of many voters who happen to be parents by activating their instinct to shield youngsters at any cost.
This determines when you're allowed to vote, purchase and consume alcohol and tobacco products, sign your name to a binding contract, purchase / consume violent and/or pornographic materials, etc.
Again, the mental capacity to vote and sign contracts hasn't changed. Most teenagers could handle these tasks if they were allowed to. Voting really isn't that hard: you look at the candidates, see which ones best represent your own interests and beliefs, and vote for them. Same with signing a contract: you read it, and if you think the benefit you're being offered is worth whatever you're agreeing to do, and what you're agreeing to do is something you'll actually be able to do, then you sign it.
If the age of majority were changed to 16, the average 16 year old would be as prepared as the average 18 year old is now because he'd be anticipating these new rights, and the average 18 year old would be more prepared because he'd have two years of experience.
Much like Metallica and any other band that stuck their nose into this whole issue, they have every right to try to control their music any way they want to. It's their intellectual property.
"Intellectual property" is not property, it's a euphemism for a set of limited monopolies granted by the government. No one has an inherent right to suppress anyone else's speech just to make a buck.
Copyright helps protect the owner from several bad things including: keeping someone else from modifying your work in a way you do not want it to be and then attributing it to you (What if someone changed Schindlers List to be favourable to the Nazi's and then stamped Speilbergs name on it?
That's an important issue, but addressing it with copyright law is overkill. All you need is a law against fraud: if you claim that your modified version of the movie is Steven Spielberg's work, you're lying to the public, just as if you pieced together a crappy car in your back yard and tried to sell it as a Toyota.
OTOH, if you want to change Schindler's List to be favorable to the Nazis, and then put your own name on it (while noting that it's based on Spielberg's original work and that you're unaffiliated with him), I say go ahead. You're presenting your product as exactly what it is, a remix of someone else's work.
It's the result of the creators time, effort, and capital.
The creator may choose to spend his time however he wants, but that doesn't obligate anyone else to pay him for it. No one forced him to spend his time producing bits. If he wants to get paid for doing that, let him charge for the service he provides.
They may still have something to pay back, you don't.
If it never occurs to them how foolish it is to work on something that by definition can't be controlled, and then try to find customers after they've already made their work available, then I'm afraid I can't feel sorry for them. The rest of us have already figured out that if you want to get paid for something, either (1) make it something you can hold on to until you get paid, or (2) find a customer and get him to agree to terms before you start wasting any of your own time.
It's mostly just sharing the works of others, without asking them if they wanted to share it that way first.
No one has a moral or ethical obligation to get permission before copying bits, so the second half of that sentence may as well be "without standing on their heads singing It's A Grand Old Flag".
Movies, cigarettes and alcohol are relatively cheap. The ten or twenty dollars a teenager might have can go a long way. But what teenager has the $300 for a game console plus $50 per game without getting the money from his parents, which I would interpret as implict approval of their use?
Not much of a solid argument. We all know that electronic equipment gets cheaper over time. Prudes were complaining about violent games 10 years ago, and today you can buy those games for peanuts. By your logic, it would make sense to have age limits on violent SNES games, but not violent Xbox 360 games.
It's not like kids can sneak out after school and hang out in the woods playing GTA with their friends.
No, but they can go visit a friend with more lenient parents and play GTA at his house. You'll find a lot more disagreement among parents as to whether their kids should be playing games like Grand Theft Auto than whether their kids should be drinking or smoking.
And it seems especially hypocritical to claim to be "protecting the family" by undermining a parent's authority to have the final say in what is acceptable for their children.
Earlier, you wrote "I am fine with legal age limits on movies, cigarettes and alcohol", but now you think parents should have the final say? What makes video games so special?
My solution? No age limits on anything. If you don't want your kids to do something, keep an eye on them, or teach them why they shouldn't do it. If that's too hard, I guess it really isn't that important to you after all. Eventually you'll realize that millions of kids do the same thing and they turn out fine.
Take something like AutoCAD, which is the result of years and years of piling on addons and extensions. Something like that is simply too complex to completely reverse engineer.
True. But would you really have to? As long as you can disassemble it into a form that can be used to recreate the program, you can take all the time you want to find the parts you want to change, clean them up a bit, and make your changes.
And remember, we're talking about a commercial program based on GPL'd code. That alone would make it a lot easier to modify the program, since you already have source code for most of it.
Age discrimination laws, at least in the US, generally only apply to ages 45 and up. Pretty convenient, huh? You can't decline a job applicant for being too old, but you can for being too young.
Imagine the outrage if the racial discrimination laws only applied to certain races!
Parents cannot enforce reasonable standards of behavior with corporal punishment without fear of prosecution as child abusers.
If they're incapable of enforcing reasonable standards of behavior without resorting to physical violence, maybe they shouldn't have had kids in the first place.
Lets see, if Copyright ends, no more GPL, so anyone would then be able to sell software with GPL'd material without having to open source it. Any company/individual can redistribute code someone else wrote for free
And any other company/individual can get that code, reverse engineer/disassemble/decompile it, and post the source code for all to see. It's a lot of work, but we have a lot of people on our side. Voila, what was closed is now (somewhat) open. When the next version of the commercial program comes out, reverse engineer the new features and add them to the open source version too. Pretty soon they'll realize they're not hiding anything.
See, one of the reasons the GPL is necessary under today's copyright laws is that you can't reverse engineer or redistribute commercial software. GPL gives back what copyright takes away.
That "coddling" is, unfortunately, the fairest thing to do. If you want to treat them as legal adults, fine - let them vote. Then they'll have a say in the laws and you can hold them 100% accountable for their violations. But as long as they're subjects instead of citizens, it's nothing short of barbaric to hold them fully accountable for breaking laws made by a government that doesn't care about their consent.
I've been waiting for this a long time. I'm paying $45 a month for analog cable, and the way it is now, I can't get HBO without subscribing to an additional digital cable package (which includes a bunch of channels I'll never watch) and an HBO "plex" (including about 5 HBO channels). That's an extra $40-50 a month to get the one channel I want. If I could just pay for the channel I want, I could actually subscribe to HBO instead of downloading the shows I watch from BT.
All right, I'll give you that, but (1) it was just an example, there are countless other things that the government provides and not everyone uses and (2) even gasoline taxes end up charging some people for roads they never use.
You could say the same about any government project. Is the decision to build roads unanimous? No. Is it fair to force someone who doesn't own a car to pay for road maintenance? Arguably, no. But that's the way governments work - not everyone agrees with every decision. Half of the voting public wanted someone else to be President in 2004, but the decision was made and we all have to live with it.
If you don't want to pay for your neighbors' internet access, you have the same rights as someone who doesn't want to pay for his neighbors' roads, or health care, or farm subsidies, or wars: either organize some like-minded people to elect representatives whose views are closer to your own, or find a different country that won't expect you to pay for those things.
To argue against this "coercion", however, is to argue for a libertarian utopia that's about as realistic as the communist utopia. If you don't want to pay taxes to any government but you still want to stay on this planet, you'll have to live on a ship in the middle of the ocean.
You know what, the moment you actually create something in your life, create something people want to use, and the moment you try to profit from what you created and the others who did nothing are benefitting in some way and/or distributing your work regardless of your wishes, completely disregarding the time/money/blood and sacrifices you had to put into your creation, that moment I will talk to you.
I hate to burst your bubble, but the IRC client I wrote is used by thousands of people every day, and has been for years. I've been paid for some of the work I did on it, and in fact people have distributed it against my wishes (see my sig).
So I think my argument deserves a little more than a hand-wave. I believe it whole-heartedly: the right to speak freely and share one's experiences with friends is more important than anyone's ability to make a buck. I don't pretend to own any strings of bits, and I don't think anyone needs to obey my wishes as to how they use what I've produced, just as I don't need to obey anyone else's wishes as to how I use the information they produce. (The GPL is somewhat of a special case, because it's about making information more available, not less.)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh?
Privacy, of which anonymity is a part, is vital in protecting freedom of speech. If you have something controversial to say, you may still be effectively restrained from saying it if you know that it'll attract suspicion from your fellow citizens or the government. For example, a business owner who has some kooky political views might not be able to discuss them if such discussion can be traced back to him, because he'll risk a boycott from customers who disagree. Should he have to choose between political speech and his own livelihood?
You know... if you were a terrorist, isn't that exactly what you'd do? Get your buddy to distract the cops by showing them his bag while you walk on to the subway with the bomb in your bag.
iPod plays mp3s. Anyone who's willing to sell me an mp3, or something I can turn into an mp3, can provide me with a product that plays on my iPod. Where's the lock-in?
OK, wise guy. If selling MP3s of songs people actually want is such a feasible business, how come Apple isn't doing it themselves? They could sell non-DRM'd popular music just as easily as Real, Napster, or any other music store, and then they'd be able to sell their music files to everyone with an MP3 player, not just iPod owners. What a shocking coincidence that none of those actually do it!
There is no equivalent to the servlet and enterprise objects in .NET, and that's just a start.
I must've been sick the day they covered that in buzzword class. WTF is an "enterprise object"? Is it like a paradigm synergizer?
Are you forgetting the army of lawyers they would have? I doubt you could afford to defend yourself.
This is hardly a new or unique problem. A malicious company could sue you for anything and you'd have trouble defending yourself against their army of lawyers. They could point to some random page on your site, claim it used to be on theirs, and sue you for infringing a copyright on a page they never even had on their own site. How would you prove they didn't write it for their site first, then take it down without leaving a trace? It sucks, but it has nothing to do with the matter at hand.
The fact is, if you actually wrote something first, and they put it up on their site after copying it from yours, it typically isn't hard to prove you had it first.
It still takes time to write the piece, so cost of duplication is irrelevant
That time has already been sunk. It doesn't take you any longer to write a page when someone else puts it up on their site.
Ask as many high school students as you can get your hands on what they think of current issues and whom they feel best suits their needs. Most of them respond that they don't know, don't care, or are inclined to vote the way their parents or teachers tell them to.
And why should they care? They can't vote, so they have no reason to look into candidates, just as I have no reason to research the issues and candidates in the UK or Canada. If they could vote, however, then I guarantee they'd show more interest.
Kids also tend to be on the naive side. They haven't been burned before so they ignore the fine print and concentrate on the too-good-to-be-true offer.
As you point out yourself, the problem there is lack of experience, not age. You can't expect someone to gain experience with decisions like this if you aren't going to let him make those decisions.
What about a will? Living will? Prenupital agreement? Marriage contract? Mortgage? How many 16 year olds do you know responsible and informed enough to enter fully into all of those agreements?
How many 25 year olds do you know who are responsible and informed enough to enter fully into all of those agreements? Hell, how many 40 year olds?
Let me put it this way: if I can introduce you to a person, and you can tell me--after taking as much time as you need--whether or not that person is responsible and informed enough to make some decision, then you'll be the first person I've ever met who can do so.
The fact is, people throw around terms like "responsible enough" and "mature enough" without having the slightest clue about what it actually means to be mature enough to make whatever decision they're talking about. If you can't make that judgment about an individual, there's no way you can make it about an entire age group.
On the other hand, if you can make that judgment about individuals, then there's no need for an age limit in the first place!
What happens when they sue you for copyright infringement?
If they had the chutzpah to do that, it wouldn't be hard to show that the article was up on your own site first. You could point to a cached version at Google or the Wayback Machine, for example.
That's why copyright is important - when the cost of duplication is zero, the only way to stop someone from ripping off your work is with a legal club.
When the cost of duplication is zero, it doesn't make much sense to talk about "ripping off". The copy that's on a newspaper's web site doesn't detract from the copy that's on your own web site.
It is important to give credit, and to that effect I believe anti-fraud laws should be enforced against plagiarists, but that's it.
Let's face it, the world we live in today is different than the world of yesterday. Kids don't grow up as quickly because they're not put to work to support their families at 13 years of age.
BS. Kids are the same as they've always been. Although the economic conditions have changed, that hasn't done a thing to make kids any less mature in the sense of being able to handle "adult" content.
The fact is, sexual and violent media isn't harmful, and people who claim that it's inappropriate for minors are almost always trying to cover up their disdain for the material in general. They just latch on to the "won't someone think of the children?" line because it's one that a lot of people don't question. If you say "it's for the children", then it seems you can disengage the minds of many voters who happen to be parents by activating their instinct to shield youngsters at any cost.
This determines when you're allowed to vote, purchase and consume alcohol and tobacco products, sign your name to a binding contract, purchase / consume violent and/or pornographic materials, etc.
Again, the mental capacity to vote and sign contracts hasn't changed. Most teenagers could handle these tasks if they were allowed to. Voting really isn't that hard: you look at the candidates, see which ones best represent your own interests and beliefs, and vote for them. Same with signing a contract: you read it, and if you think the benefit you're being offered is worth whatever you're agreeing to do, and what you're agreeing to do is something you'll actually be able to do, then you sign it.
If the age of majority were changed to 16, the average 16 year old would be as prepared as the average 18 year old is now because he'd be anticipating these new rights, and the average 18 year old would be more prepared because he'd have two years of experience.
I wholeheartedly opposed this law, and I'm glad it was overturned. I'm not a minor, but unlike many posters, it seems, I remember being one.
NTFS does have hard links.
Much like Metallica and any other band that stuck their nose into this whole issue, they have every right to try to control their music any way they want to. It's their intellectual property.
"Intellectual property" is not property, it's a euphemism for a set of limited monopolies granted by the government. No one has an inherent right to suppress anyone else's speech just to make a buck.
Copyright helps protect the owner from several bad things including: keeping someone else from modifying your work in a way you do not want it to be and then attributing it to you (What if someone changed Schindlers List to be favourable to the Nazi's and then stamped Speilbergs name on it?
That's an important issue, but addressing it with copyright law is overkill. All you need is a law against fraud: if you claim that your modified version of the movie is Steven Spielberg's work, you're lying to the public, just as if you pieced together a crappy car in your back yard and tried to sell it as a Toyota.
OTOH, if you want to change Schindler's List to be favorable to the Nazis, and then put your own name on it (while noting that it's based on Spielberg's original work and that you're unaffiliated with him), I say go ahead. You're presenting your product as exactly what it is, a remix of someone else's work.
But it's not just bits.
It's the result of the creators time, effort, and capital.
The creator may choose to spend his time however he wants, but that doesn't obligate anyone else to pay him for it. No one forced him to spend his time producing bits. If he wants to get paid for doing that, let him charge for the service he provides.
They may still have something to pay back, you don't.
If it never occurs to them how foolish it is to work on something that by definition can't be controlled, and then try to find customers after they've already made their work available, then I'm afraid I can't feel sorry for them. The rest of us have already figured out that if you want to get paid for something, either (1) make it something you can hold on to until you get paid, or (2) find a customer and get him to agree to terms before you start wasting any of your own time.
It's mostly just sharing the works of others, without asking them if they wanted to share it that way first.
No one has a moral or ethical obligation to get permission before copying bits, so the second half of that sentence may as well be "without standing on their heads singing It's A Grand Old Flag".
Regardless, it'd be nice if Passtime would give me the freakin' code to generate the Passtime codes so I can integrate it into my software!
Please let me know if they come through; I'd also like to integrate that code into my software.
Regards,
A Car Thief
Movies, cigarettes and alcohol are relatively cheap. The ten or twenty dollars a teenager might have can go a long way. But what teenager has the $300 for a game console plus $50 per game without getting the money from his parents, which I would interpret as implict approval of their use?
Not much of a solid argument. We all know that electronic equipment gets cheaper over time. Prudes were complaining about violent games 10 years ago, and today you can buy those games for peanuts. By your logic, it would make sense to have age limits on violent SNES games, but not violent Xbox 360 games.
It's not like kids can sneak out after school and hang out in the woods playing GTA with their friends.
No, but they can go visit a friend with more lenient parents and play GTA at his house. You'll find a lot more disagreement among parents as to whether their kids should be playing games like Grand Theft Auto than whether their kids should be drinking or smoking.
And it seems especially hypocritical to claim to be "protecting the family" by undermining a parent's authority to have the final say in what is acceptable for their children.
Earlier, you wrote "I am fine with legal age limits on movies, cigarettes and alcohol", but now you think parents should have the final say? What makes video games so special?
My solution? No age limits on anything. If you don't want your kids to do something, keep an eye on them, or teach them why they shouldn't do it. If that's too hard, I guess it really isn't that important to you after all. Eventually you'll realize that millions of kids do the same thing and they turn out fine.
Take something like AutoCAD, which is the result of years and years of piling on addons and extensions. Something like that is simply too complex to completely reverse engineer.
True. But would you really have to? As long as you can disassemble it into a form that can be used to recreate the program, you can take all the time you want to find the parts you want to change, clean them up a bit, and make your changes.
And remember, we're talking about a commercial program based on GPL'd code. That alone would make it a lot easier to modify the program, since you already have source code for most of it.
Age discrimination laws, at least in the US, generally only apply to ages 45 and up. Pretty convenient, huh? You can't decline a job applicant for being too old, but you can for being too young.
Imagine the outrage if the racial discrimination laws only applied to certain races!
Parents cannot enforce reasonable standards of behavior with corporal punishment without fear of prosecution as child abusers.
If they're incapable of enforcing reasonable standards of behavior without resorting to physical violence, maybe they shouldn't have had kids in the first place.
Lets see, if Copyright ends, no more GPL, so anyone would then be able to sell software with GPL'd material without having to open source it. Any company/individual can redistribute code someone else wrote for free
And any other company/individual can get that code, reverse engineer/disassemble/decompile it, and post the source code for all to see. It's a lot of work, but we have a lot of people on our side. Voila, what was closed is now (somewhat) open. When the next version of the commercial program comes out, reverse engineer the new features and add them to the open source version too. Pretty soon they'll realize they're not hiding anything.
See, one of the reasons the GPL is necessary under today's copyright laws is that you can't reverse engineer or redistribute commercial software. GPL gives back what copyright takes away.
That "coddling" is, unfortunately, the fairest thing to do. If you want to treat them as legal adults, fine - let them vote. Then they'll have a say in the laws and you can hold them 100% accountable for their violations. But as long as they're subjects instead of citizens, it's nothing short of barbaric to hold them fully accountable for breaking laws made by a government that doesn't care about their consent.
I've been waiting for this a long time. I'm paying $45 a month for analog cable, and the way it is now, I can't get HBO without subscribing to an additional digital cable package (which includes a bunch of channels I'll never watch) and an HBO "plex" (including about 5 HBO channels). That's an extra $40-50 a month to get the one channel I want. If I could just pay for the channel I want, I could actually subscribe to HBO instead of downloading the shows I watch from BT.
All right, I'll give you that, but (1) it was just an example, there are countless other things that the government provides and not everyone uses and (2) even gasoline taxes end up charging some people for roads they never use.
You could say the same about any government project. Is the decision to build roads unanimous? No. Is it fair to force someone who doesn't own a car to pay for road maintenance? Arguably, no. But that's the way governments work - not everyone agrees with every decision. Half of the voting public wanted someone else to be President in 2004, but the decision was made and we all have to live with it.
If you don't want to pay for your neighbors' internet access, you have the same rights as someone who doesn't want to pay for his neighbors' roads, or health care, or farm subsidies, or wars: either organize some like-minded people to elect representatives whose views are closer to your own, or find a different country that won't expect you to pay for those things.
To argue against this "coercion", however, is to argue for a libertarian utopia that's about as realistic as the communist utopia. If you don't want to pay taxes to any government but you still want to stay on this planet, you'll have to live on a ship in the middle of the ocean.
You know what, the moment you actually create something in your life, create something people want to use, and the moment you try to profit from what you created and the others who did nothing are benefitting in some way and/or distributing your work regardless of your wishes, completely disregarding the time/money/blood and sacrifices you had to put into your creation, that moment I will talk to you.
I hate to burst your bubble, but the IRC client I wrote is used by thousands of people every day, and has been for years. I've been paid for some of the work I did on it, and in fact people have distributed it against my wishes (see my sig).
So I think my argument deserves a little more than a hand-wave. I believe it whole-heartedly: the right to speak freely and share one's experiences with friends is more important than anyone's ability to make a buck. I don't pretend to own any strings of bits, and I don't think anyone needs to obey my wishes as to how they use what I've produced, just as I don't need to obey anyone else's wishes as to how I use the information they produce. (The GPL is somewhat of a special case, because it's about making information more available, not less.)