Verily I say unto thee, that The Ghost In The Machine spake thusly:
> In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Roy Schestowitz
> <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote on Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:33:42 +0000
> <1240058.FsmLz5orMg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>> It's not "piracy" and it's clear who is paying for that pro-RAND,
>> anti-FOSS BS (see below for recent BSA-IDC-Microsoft circuses all
>> across the EU).
>
> I'm not even sure it's theft (provided the writer is properly
> identified in the credits of the borrowed work)
It is theft if the law defines it as such, however IMHO software of any
kind should not be classified as property, and thus obtaining it out of
license should not be a crime. However, it is still perfectly feasible
to sell artistic work that is not restricted by copyrights. Copyrights
are merely an attempt to /enforce/ sales, which is just the legislative
equivalent of DRM, and is not actually /required/ to sell artistic work
of any kind. Here's two examples of such work that is distributed under
permissive terms /and/ sold:
Bound by Law (by-nc-sa license)
http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/buy.html
The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Open Publication License)
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
(Also available on Amazon.)
Plagiarism is another matter. Authors should rightfully be credited with
attribution, provided it is known and provided it is practical to do so.
> though it might be unrealized sales revenue.
I believe that's false reasoning. Those who are disinclined to pay will
not pay anyway, regardless of whether or not the license is restrictive.
The only difference between releasing artistic work under a restrictive
license, and releasing it under a permissive licence, is that those who
obtain that work without paying are only classed as "criminals" in the
former case. I don't believe the final outcome would change at all, in
terms of actual units sold.
There will always be those who prefer official channels; or gift-sets;
or signed copies; or some other value-added presentations of the work,
and will happily pay for it. Look at the success of Radiohead's "free"
music deal (despite U2 manager Paul McGuinness' speculative cynicism).
People /still/ paid for something they /could/ have obtained for free.
Why?
I strongly believe that most ordinary people simply do not even /think/
about the implications of licensing at all. They just obtain whatever
they want to obtain, by whatever means they prefer, with little or no
regard for licensing.
> Granted, someone -- I'd have to look up who but it's either one of
> the Founding Fathers or someone back in the 18th century, if not
> earlier -- proposed copyrights
The first copyright law was Statute of Anne in 1709, although there
seems to have been more limited monopolies granted earlier than that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law
Nick Mailer, the director of The Positive Internet Company, has a rather
interesting talk on the subject:
http://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/debian-meetings/2007/debconf7/high/072_Free_as_in_Market_the_misunderstood_entanglement_of_ethics_software_and_profits.ogg
> the intent being to stop plagiarism, presumably
The motives have been many and varied over the centuries, some rather
sinister, including censorship, and apparently even an "attempt to
prevent the spread of the Protestant Reformation", according to Wiki-P.
> the general ideas include the ability to control distribution, an
> issue if one were to write something for the military (e.g., detailed
> plans for a rocket propulsive device [*], perhaps, after one retires
> from active service).
I would have assumed that such information would fall under the category
of trade (or in this case /military/) secret, and classified as a matter
of national security, rather than merely restricted by copyright for
commercial considerations.
> Controlling distribution is a bit tough today, given things such as
> the Web, YouTube, and widespread media digitization.
>
> And of course there are issues if person A writes something and
> person B includes it in his work; "fair use" used to cover that
> though I'm not sure if it does anymore.
Not according to the Associated Press, anyway, who have unilaterally
decided to arbitrarily revoke fair use rights by demanding $12.50 to
quote five words from one of their articles. They don't specify if that
is five /consecutive/ words though, nor if common words like "and";
"or"; "the"; "if" and "but" are exempted (do I now owe AP $12.50?).
http://license.icopyright.net/user/offer.act?gid=3&inprocess=t&sid=36&tag=3.5721%3Ficx_id%3DD90VCFA01&urs=WEBPAGE&urt=nullit
> (It was a lot easier before cut and paste, I suspect.)
There's even a javascript hack to prevent that, although it's easily
circumvented.
> Admittedly, under ideal conditions FLOSS would track everyone's
> contributions and changes, giving proper credit
Authors should always be recognised for their work, but sometimes
providing attribution can lead to problems, as with the original BSD
license (the so-called "advertising clause"):
[quote]
When people put many such programs together in an operating system, the
result is a serious problem. Imagine if a software system required 75
different sentences, each one naming a different author or group of
authors. To advertise that, you would need a full-page ad.
This might seem like extrapolation ad absurdum, but it is actual fact.
In a 1997 version of NetBSD, I counted 75 of these sentences.
(Fortunately NetBSD has decided to stop adding them, and to remove those
it could.)
[/quote]
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html
Of course attribution doesn't have to be in a /license/, it can be in
the comment blocks of the source, although even that can sometimes
spiral out of control, leading to kilobytes of comments for just a few
lines of code.
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| "The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining
| armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos
| neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate
| technology, led them into it in the first place." ~ Douglas Adams
`----
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.23.8-63.fc8
01:46:56 up 210 days, 22:22, 4 users, load average: 0.09, 0.14, 0.18
|
|
