Free with respect to purely informational matters means that you lay no
claim whatsoever to the physical property of others, including their
own speech or distribution of information, that requires monetary
compensation or cessation of operations. More concisely, it means that
you release the information with a promise that you will not use
violence or the threat thereof to collect proceeds from its use. This
means that all legal rights over the material are waived, and that
nobody else may claim these rights in the future (assuming the
complexity required to lay claim to an idea is not decreasing over
time, which, in reality, it is).
On 03/03/2010 01:41 PM, Rob Myers wrote:
On 03/03/10 04:08, George De Bruin wrote:
Let's not forget that free songs are often copyrighted, but that
Libre.fm will never be allowing nonfree materials for download.
Yes, but what is your definition of free?
http://freedomdefined.org/Definition
gets my vote as well.
What freedomdefined doesn't go into is *why* this definition is good.
It's obviously derived from the Free Software definition [1], but
culture ain't software. The reason it works for culture as well as
software is that both cultural works and software are texts, legally
speaking. And copyright law is used to try and restrict our use and
production of such texts [2], which affects our freedom of speech [3].
We can use alternative licencing to protect our freedom of speech as it
applies to those texts and is challenged by copyright and other legal
measures.
[1] -
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
[2] -
http://www.chillingeffects.org/
[3] - "Code is speech" -
http://www.eff.org/victories/
- Rob.
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