Re: [Fsfe-uk] Young Greens moving on FS

[Ian Lynch]

On Tue, 2004-11-23 at 09:20, root wrote:
> Mark Preston writes:
>  
>  > You are almost certainly correct when you state that "many Free Software 
>  > folks are quite happy with Copyright". The Gnu GPL would not be 
>  > necessary if there was no copyright laws that could be infringed. The 
>  > Gnu project could happily continue IMHO if copyright laws were abolished.
> 
> 
> WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG 
> 
> Without copyright laws M****S*ft could and would take firefox, bundle
> it with their OS under their own brand name, 

But with no copyright at all you could then take whatever they did and
rebrand it to whatever you wanted. While there is copyright law you need
ways of licensing that maximise freedom without allowing completely
unfair exploitation. Ok you might not get the source code (but how
likely is the source to stay secret if anyone could leak it leagally?)
but that would not be too much of an issue if you could just use the
stuff anyway with inpunity. Without copyright/patents anyone could use
anything and it would work in all directions. This would almost
certainly be unworkable in general terms though we don't know for sure
because it hasn't been tried. Nevertheless the risk is such that its
unlikely to be tried so the idea of getting rid of all copyright and
patents is probably not realistic.

> For that matter, neither GNU nor Mozilla or any of the others would
> have started without copyright, and imagine what a retrograde world
> that would be! It shows that getting rid of copyright only serves to
> *help* the monopolists.

I doubt it would help them much or they would be campaigning for it!

> We *need* copyright.

We as in everyone.
-- 
Ian Lynch <address@hidden>
ZMS Ltd