Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Copyfree

[Fabio Pesari]

On 02/26/2016 06:45 AM, Aaron Wolf wrote:
> 
> I think Snowdrift.coop can't succeed enough without copyleft in
> practice, but these are tactical arguments still. People who believe in
> other tactics are still welcome to participate in the discussion. In
> this case, if the people in question were predictable, dogmatic
> extremists, their participation would be of little value, and I wouldn't
> encourage it. In reality, while the Copyfree website may not give this
> impression, the folks behind that are non-extremist reasonable people
> who participated in productive discussion.

I'm sure of it, and I trust your judgement anyway. Being willing to
welcome people with differing views than our own is always a good thing,
but there is a thin line between giving them a platform to speak and
being perceived to endorse them.

In the case of Copyfree, my worry is mostly about the fact that they are
a niche initiative, and it's a lot easier for corporations to co-opt
Copyfree to use it to discredit not only the GPL but also Creative
Commons licenses than to use open source for the same reasons, since
nobody in the open source movement would not consider the Linux kernel
or Blender "not free enough" for example.

Don't forget that after Bruce Perens created open source, he regretted
what it became ([0]). I think that if they really are free software
supporters, they are going to end up doing the same.

Right now, I just don't see any mention of "proprietary" or "nonfree" or
even "closed" in their homepage, and no statements about copyright
abolition. If they made those statements, I would take them more
seriously, and it would be harder for corporations to co-opt them.

If anything, I found this in their policy/copyright page:

> Toward this end, the Copyfree Initiative advocates for, and supports,
> the use of those provisions of copyright law that enable the freeing
> of works from the monopoly restrictions of copyright law right here,
> right now, without significant reform or abolishment.

They clearly are:

1) Advocating to use _some_ provisions of copyright law, but not others.

   Doesn't sound like downright abolitionism to me, and it's the same
   position as the free software movement, just without any concern for
   those provisions which could actually protect the end users.

2) Stating that their plan would help free works from monopoly
   restrictions _without significant reform or abolishment_.

   Aside from this statement being clearly indifferent to copyright
   abolitionism, it is plain false, because as we've seen, under
   current copyright law what they promote is simply not sufficient
   to prevent proprietary works from being created and if anything, it
   helps them!

I've also read their page about copyleft and the only reasonable point
they make is about incompatibility, but the solution to incompatibility
is avoiding copyleft as much as the solution to headache is decapitation.

[0]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/02/msg01641.html