21 Feb
2006
21 Feb
'06
5:45 p.m.
On Tuesday 21 February 2006 16:14, Rob wrote:
On Tue February 21 2006 15:08, Peter Bessman wrote:
I beg your pardon? GPL'd code I can make cd's of and give them away on
street corners, or sell them for a couple of bucks apiece, its
absolutely, totally, 100% LEGAL in every sense of the word. I can
modify it for MY uses as much as I want, but any patches I want to pass
along to anyone else based on my work on that GPL'd code ARE ALSO
COVERED BY THE GPL, this is the so-called viral nature of the GPL. I
can live with that rather nicely and have since about 1994 and my Amiga
days.
The fact that it's illegal to sell your vote
does not prove
that contracts can be morally wrong.
Not that the 'shrink-wrap licenses' to which Fons was referring
are even accepted as contracts in many venues. I certainly
never had a contract with, say, Syntrillian in the bad old days
when I would download a pirated copy of Cool Edit Pro; the text
of whatever EULA they used was never even included with the
illicit version. The GPL itself is also not a contract; it's a
license without which you can't distribute the program except by
violating copyright. The respect argument is specious as well; I certainly
don't
respect Wal-Mart when I'm buying a new toothbrush or whatever.
(And since I've paid for it, I'm perfectly within my rights to
share that toothbrush with anyone, though I'd probably rather
not.)
So we're back to copyright violation, not breach of contract.
And I stand by my original statement. I kinda like copyright
now that there's enough software covered under the GPL to make
it inconvenient for the people who fought so hard to extend
copyright to cover computer software in the first place.
But I strongly disagree with disney's being able to buy whatever laws he
needed to keep Mickey from becoming PD. For one companies benefit,
millions of others are damaged. Copyright laws as they existed the
year I was born (1934) are as fair and non-abusive as could be. Today,
don't be funny, because it certainly isn't.
Nonetheless, those who have attempted to use copyright
to turn
imaginary property (based on infinite reproducibility) into real
property (based on scarcity) are wrong, no matter how much it
might benefit them to do so.
No they are not wrong. Were I an artist making fantasticly populer
music, I'd damned sure want to be paid a royalty on every copy made,
regardless of how its made. Until the copyright ran out. The one
single most broken thing about copyright is that its for sale to the
highest bidder. I should be able to contract with someone to publish
100,000 copies minimum, over a period of say 5 years, at the end if
which that contract is fini and they would have no further rights to
make or ship from stock another copy if the contract has expired, the
copyright itself never having left MY possession.
One million copies of notepad.exe
have the exact same value in the real world as a single copy,
regardless of how much sweat some peon in Redmond shed during
its initial development. And that goes for emacs, Finder, Doom
3, Donkey Kong, In A Silent Way, Oliver Twist, Citizen Kane and
the Mona Lisa too.
As long as you are enumerating these, add the provision 'per copy' and
it makes perfect sense. But to say that 1 million copies of Citizen
Kane are worth the same as 1, when the million will weigh close to that
in pounds, and will have killed 100,000 trees to print them doesn't
evalute the worth of the trees, nor of shipping that weight to market.
That peon in Redmond still needs to eat, albeit I don't agree with bill
taking 99.99% of the sale as commission. So the peon is a kept slave
in fact.
I don't want to hear the "but no one can make
any money unless we
treat copies like physical objects" line anymore either. If I
went into business selling a new kind of wrenches, with a
shrink-wrap agreement on the outside requiring that they were
only to be used by the purchaser, and then went broke because
people started sharing their wrenches left and right despite my
legal threats, I would deserve to be broke for pursuing such an
unrealistic business plan. See also: CueCat.
Excelent example. I still have one of those things around here
someplace. But I don't care enough to go find it...
Rob
--
Cheers, Gene
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Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.