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Differentiating allies and opponents in the Copyright debate
,----[ Quote ]
| The largest growing part of the software
| sector, and which most threatens the legacy
| business models of BSA members, is the
| Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS)
| movement. I joined this multi-sectoral
| movement, which includes but is not limited
| to commercial software companies, in the
| early 1990's. Most of the policies promoted
| by the BSA since the mid 1990's have been
| aimed at stopping or reducing the growth of
| this movement. The two most active policies
| are software patents and legal protection
| for technical measures.
|
| [...]
|
| Independent software authors have obvious
| allies with other independent software
| authors. There is the Open Source
| Initiative, the Free Software Foundation
| and the Linux Foundation in the US, and
| various software user/developer groups in
| Canada such as CLUE: Canada's Association
| for Open Source.
|
| If you look at the membership for the Linux
| Foundation and the BSA, you may notice
| there are overlapping companies between who
| I consider to be my most obvious opponents
| and allies. This is not only true within
| these associations, but within individual
| companies. I've observed informal policy
| debates between employees of IBM, with
| these different employees being as far as
| two individuals can be from each other on
| key areas of technology policy.
|
| [...]
|
| The BSA members are using the labels as
| their public face to the political process,
| just as the labels have always used
| specific famous musicians as their public
| face. Michael Geist has suggested that the
| major labels are behind the latest
| Astroturf campaign, and from what I have
| seen I suspect this is true.
`----
http://www.itworldcanada.com/blogs/ahead/2010/06/19/determining-allies-and-opponents-in-the-copyright-debate/53185/
Recent:
BSA: Hardware Without Software Not Tax Deductible
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| The Czech Ministry of Finance along with
| the BSA threaten to disallow deducting
| hardware from base tax if purchased
| without software. This idea stems from
| their joint proclamation that for software
| to be used legally, it must be bought â
| thus completely ignoring the existence of
| free and open source software which can be
| obtained legally without any purchase
| whatsoever. The Ministry and the BSA have
| issued a press release which basically
| labels all users of 'free software'
| pirates. Many public organizations and
| companies (including Red Hat and Novell)
| have expressed their dismay at such
| actions of the Ministry.
`----
http://www.abclinuxu.cz/clanky/mfcr-bsa-open-source?page=1
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