Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Buying the rights to proprietary programs to free them

[Andrew A. Adams]

Fabio Pesari  wrote:
> His silence left me some time to think about this issue. I came to the
> conclusion that there isn't the mindset yet for this kind of reasoning,
> and such proposals can be considered even offensive by some developers.

> I think some developers would feel more comfortable selling their code
> to VCs and big companies than the users themselves, even if they got to
> keep the copyright and to keep selling the programs.

I had a similar experience recently in trying to persuade some academic 
literature Open Access discussants that CC-BY-SA (the copyleft CC license 
that corresponds most closely to the GPL) should be the correct license for 
published academic papers. I pointed out that "CC-BY-SA doesn't directly 
prevent someone from taking that work and putting it behind a paywall." but I 
then went on to pioint out that the CC-BY element means that anything which 
is just a straight copy won't be bought by anyone because it is (or at least 
should be) available gratis elsewhere (and easily finadable). I then pointed 
out that the SA copyleft element meant that anyone making some kind of 
derivative work would have to offer that work under a libre license and that 
if it was really exxpensive no one would buy it (then who cares that it 
exists, no one is paying for it) and if it's cheap enough, some group could 
club together, buy access to a single copy anad then re-distribute.

The only respondent just quoted the first line "CC-BY-SA doesn't directly 
prevent someone from taking that work and putting it behind a paywall." and 
said that this clearly means that CC-BY-SA is not the right license, 
competely ignoring my analysis of the implications of the SA element. Sigh.

I must also admit, that since I don't generally get paid for my academic 
writing (*) that I don't really care if someone makes a derivative work and 
makes some modest money from it. So long as they don't do so by trying to 
restrict access to my work by me and others, I don't care if they manage to 
find a way to make money from adding something to my work. But, it does seem 
like lots of people a) do object and b) seem to think that there is some 
serious possibility that their work might make someone else rich without them 
getting in on the action. Of course those of us who've studied copyright and 
copyleft understand that copyright often favours exactly this kind of 
exploitation (see the Queen song: Death of Two Legs, for example) while 
copyleft has a built in limiter.


(*) it's possible - I have an undergrad textbook for which I get modest 
royalties and I COULD register with the UK's copyright licensing authority to 
get some modest payments if I could be bothered.
-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams                      aaa@meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/