You Can't Oppose Copyright and Support Open Source

Reader gbulmash sends us to his essay on the fallacy of those who would abolish copyright. The argument is that without copyright granting an author the right to set licensing terms for his/her work, the GPL could not be enforced. The essay concludes that if you support the GPL or any open source license (other than public domain), your fight should be not about how to abolish copyright, but how to reform copyright.

Wait

[The Bungi]

I thought the author was going to make the mistake of saying that without copyright the GPL would be useless, but he actually makes a good point. I think the problem with licenses like the GPL and the Creative Commons are all about sticking it to The Man and a sort of social statement to the effect that IP ownership laws are broken, but they rely on an imagined legal and social framework that simply does not exist yet - and probably never will, though that's just my opinion. The efectiveness of these licenses (which overwhelmingly deal with distribution rather than use) wobbles on top of the very foundation they are trying to destroy. And none of them have addressed just what exactly is going to happen after they manage to topple it down.

I'm not a big fan of the GPL, but I don't think public domain or a BSD-type deal is going to work either. But for everything I've ever read from Stallman and friends, I don't really think they have it down, either. It's as if they are sitting there hoping something will happen that will validate their position and everything will be kumbaya and honky dory. What that is they have no idea.

Stallman can rewrite his license until the cows come home, but without some real change in the legal area it won't really make much difference. And piling restrictions up on top of the GPL can only go so far. Not his fault - that's just reality.

And that's just for software... wait 'til you get into music and images and whatnot. The Creative Commons are in the same bind.

Right....

[bky1701]

This is kind of like saying that if you are against socialism you should be against unions, or if you are for the death penalties for murder you should be for it for assault as well.

Just because you support the GPL as a good fix in the current climate does not mean you approve of the current climate. BSD fails for many projects because a company will walk in, grab the code, edit it a little to add proprietary components, sell it and hurt the development of the free project. See wine.

While the GPL isn't ideal, it defeats the "I am going to take your code, make a small change and call it mine" that wouldn't exist if no copyright existed in the first place. If copyright didn't exist, decompiling and DRM cracks would quickly negate any attempts to restrict use of code/programs.

Take music for example. Some guy makes a background track under the GPL; people use it in their GPL songs or pay (for the development of more free background tracks) to use it in non-free songs. Then take one who puts it under something BSD-ish. The RIAA comes in, sticks Brittney Spears on top of it, makes millions of $$$ and goes around suing people that didn't pay them for what they only edited.

Not to say that's likely, but it's a good example. If all open projects used the BSD, it's more likely than not MS/Apple would have just taken the best, stuck it in a proprietary package and sold it, making it so open projects could never get ahead or even catch up. Hell Apple already did this, with BSD itself none the less. How many times do people on slashdot alone say that they used to use Linux/BSD until OS X came around that had all the best of open software, except the fact that it was truly open?

So far as I care, the only reason I use the GPL and not BSD is because I don't want someone else having a full copyright on something using what I created. That's not why I created it.

This is just typical FUD BS

[zappepcs]

at least in my opinion. Remember, my opinion is worth what you paid for it.

Nobody is against copyright per se. What people are against is how copyright is used to damage the principle for which it was founded. Artists should have copyright to their work. Distribution companies should not. If you write some really nifty software you should have copyrights to it, not a patent unless it seems to revolutionize the software industry or some part of it.

What people (/. in general) are against is using that copyright authority to run roughshod over the public with it. Nobody really wants musicians to give their art away for free. What we see today is a backlash on the business model of the RIAA and their member companies. I don't think that there are many people that aren't willing to pay a modest/reasonable price for a CD. They do however want to be able to use that CD and its content where ever they want to, including loaning it to a friend, reselling it, or making backup copies so they don't have to purchase it multiple times. These issues have nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with how the **AA (and consequently the government) abuse copyright law to line their own pockets.

The people who write OSS software deserve the copyrights to that, and I often contribute to those projects that I feel I use and enjoy. Hell, I even once bought a copy of winzip. As far as patents go, even the USPTO/courts are starting to realize that the patent situation is totally out of control, and harming business interests as well as damaging the public good that it was meant to foster. Notice that recent rulings may invalidate the patents that Verizon holds that were used to nearly drive Vonage out of business. That is exactly the opposite of what they were meant to do.

To say that the F/OSS community in general doesn't like copyright or patents is absurd. What they don't like (and I'm taking liberties in speaking for them) is how they are used to drive unjust revenues at the expense of the public and the original content producers. iTMS is evidence that people will pay for content if it is usable, though I have some questions about how ultimately useful iTunes DRM'ed music actually is.

If patents and copyrights were applied in a logical and fair manner, producing the productivity and benefits they are supposed to, nobody on /. would have much of a problem. This truly is a case of the people speaking with one mind, even if there are people who can't figure out what is being said.

Re:Another sophomoric Sunday blog post.

[Bruce Perens]

Not all of us can make a living being open source gasbags, you know. If it weren't for software patents, I would be a poor man.

Prove it. I looked, and could not find any patents issued to "Anonymous Coward". :-)

And by the way, my employer makes Open Source software for Wall Street investment banking firms. I am, however, also paid by customers (usually also Wall Street investment banks, but sometimes other entities) who want me to teach or lecture.

Bruce

Re:The problem with copyright...

[Dirtside]

In this case you're wrong; anything published before 1923 is now in the public domain, regardless of when the author died. Source: Cornell [cornell.edu]

Re:abolish copyright

[KutuluWare]

The author of TFA is seriously confused about a lot of things, one of those things being the goals of the Free Software Foundation. Stallman is probably one of the most extreme ultra-liberal people to ever sit at a keyboard, and yet I don't think he's ever once pushed for total abolition of copyright.

What RMS and ideologically similar people have proposed is this: software should not be covered under copyright law. You can see this ideal most clearly if you head over to http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html [gnu.org] and read the two articles called "Why Software Should {Be Free,Not Have Owners}". While I disagree with his philosophy, he makes a pretty solid empirical case for why software should not be "owned" in the same sense that books are "owned" by their author or art is "owned" by the artist.

The author of the article also fails to pick up on a key point about the GPL and why it exists: because there is copyright law, the FSF must use copyright law to accomplish their goals. If software was suddenly declared ineligible for copyright, there'd be no need for the GPL because no proprietary software company could prevent people with access to their source code from modifying or redistributing it, nor could they prevent people from modifying or distributing binary copies of the software. This is a small step back from the current state where the group of people with access to the GPL'd source code includes everyone with a copy of the binary, but it's a giant leap forward in eliminating all the complex legal issues around who can copy what and where.



--K

RTFM

[dircha]

Looks like another college sophomore just discovered the GPL.

Welcome, sir. To start, why don't you Read the Fine Manual?

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html [gnu.org]

The FSF is an organization committed to the advancement of Free Software. The FSF contends that proprietary (non-Free) software development and distribution is unethical and should cease because it fails to satisfy the 4 essential freedoms of software users.

Free software is software that satisfies the 4 essential freedoms of users of software. These freedoms are completely independent of Copyright's existence or non-existence. The definition of Free Software makes no mention of copyright.

Absent the voluntary or involuntary elimination of proprietary software, the Free Software Foundation generally encourages the use of Copyleft. You seem to be confused about the difference between Free Software and Copyleft. Free Software is software that satisfies the 4 essential freedoms of software users. Copyleft, on the other hand, is a licensing strategy employed wherin existing Copyright law is leveraged to further the proliferation of Free Software. There is much non-Copylefted Free Software.

You also seem to confuse Open Source with Free Software or Copyleft. These are all quite different things.

Once again, I refer you to the Fine manual:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-fr eedom.html [gnu.org]

Having said all this, please consider taking a few minutes to inform yourself in the future before making wild generalizations about people and organizations you know nothing about. And congrats on completing sophomore year!

Re:abolish copyright

[WilliamSChips]

Actually, plagiarizing ideas isn't enough [hatrack.com] for copyright infringement.

While I'm not a lawyer, I can tell you the understanding that I have: Unless it can be shown that a work uses about a third of the written language of the source, or closely paraphrases it for many long passages, there is nothing actionable under the law. Ideas can't be copyrighted, nor can titles (titles can only be trademarked, and then only if you're using them for merchandising, and even then only if it's not a common word).

Re:GPL is not freedom. It is restriction.

[statusbar]

Do you understand why Richard Stallman even started the GPL? He wrote a program, published the source code as public domain.

Another company took it out of the public domain and copyrighted it for themselves, and then told Richard that he was violating THEIR copyright.

This is the reasons of the restrictions in the GPL.

So tell me, has the public domain changed?

--jeffk++

Re:GPL is not freedom. It is restriction.

[statusbar]

Sorry for the confusion. here is the original story [wikipedia.org], where the problem with public domain appears.

--jeffk++

Unintentional copying?

[tepples]

IP (which covers copyrights AND patents, so patents are not irrelevant. They are every bit as much a part of the picture as copyright.)

The statutes in the United States do not define "intellectual property", probably because copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets are more different than similar [gnu.org]. If you want to make an argument about copyrights and patents, you need to make it once for copyrights and once for patents because any analogy between copyrights and patents is bound to be leaky [wikipedia.org].

Copyright was created out of the exact same reasoning 297 years ago as it is used to today, to protect an established industry.

By law, the publishing industry trade association (at the time called Stationers Guild) owned all copyrights in apparent perpetuity until the so-called Statute of Anne was enacted. The Statute of Anne allowed authors to retain their copyrights and license them to publishers. The apparent regression from the Statute of Anne to a state more like that of the old Stationers Guild is caused by two things:

• Copyright term extensions have been extended by an order of magnitude from the 14-year term established by the Statute of Anne.
• In many industries, the standard of production is so high that it takes dozens of people to create a work. Therefore, most works in these industries fall under the "work made for hire" rule, where the publisher is deemed the author.

And I restate the only legitimate claim in ALL of this is that of authorship. Those who plagiarize are the only ones that should be looked after.

When I write a song, how can I tell whether I am the rightful author or I am unintentionally plagiarizing [wikipedia.org] an existing copyrighted work? As seen in Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, 420 F. Supp. 177 (SDNY 1976) [columbia.edu], the damages for even unintentional infringement can be high enough to bankrupt an indie artist. "My Sweet Lord" on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] gives more background.