Re: Were Intellectual Property to be abolished altogether, would you or FSF support it?

[Aaron Wolf]

If you want a lot more to reflect on, one option is my own long essay
from years ago that itself has tons of links:

https://blog.wolftune.com/2008/06/rational-view-of-copyright.html

(apologies if there's anything objectionable on the site, I've tried to
make it clean, but I started on Blogger before I understood free
software well enough, and I *still* haven't gotten around to escaping to
my own server, it's on my task list)

On 2021-07-11 4:04 p.m., Yasuaki Kudo wrote:
>    Thank you for all of your replies - I am no legal expert but in framing
>    this hypothesis, the spirit of abolishing the Intellectual Property
>    would perhaps also need to be stated (Legislators probably wouldn't be
>    able to even make a draft without it 😅) and the society will need to be
>    supportive of it.
> 
>    Otherwise, there will be all sorts of ways to work around the abolition
>    , including never releasing the relevant information to the public.
> 
>    And yes, trademarks etc - it would be very inconvenient if we couldn't
>    even make unique identifications 😅
> 
>    And there seems to be a long history for this
>    subject. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright
> 
>    My original motivation of this inquiry is that my partners and I are in
>    the process of starting an IT-focused 'worker cooperative' where, just
>    like the GPL licensing, there is almost a playful inversion of
>    Capitalistic values.  We will probably need to make software licensing
>    decisions sooner or later and I wanted to get a wholistic view of this
>    matter 😄.
> 
>    -Yasu
> 
>      On Jul 12, 2021, at 03:27, quiliro@riseup.net wrote:
> 
>    
> 
>      On 2021-07-10 4:44 p.m., Yasuaki Kudo wrote:
> 
>      This is a thought experiment:
> 
>      Would you or FSF support the idea of abolishing the concept of
> 
>      intellectual property altogether, making any form of 'Software
> 
>      Licensing', including GPL, null and void.  Gone also will be any
> 
>      form of Patents and Copyrights.
> 
>      Just curious 😄
> 
>      -Yasu
> 
>    Aaron Wolf <wolftune@riseup.net> writes:
> 
>      I support the abolition of copyright and patent law while keeping
> 
>      trademark law and moving some important things to new laws:
> 
>      - mandate source release for published works
> 
>      - prohibit DRM
> 
>      - expand trademark law to cover all forms of plaigiarism (some
>      aspects
> 
>      of that rely on copyright today, which is a bad legal structure)
> 
>      Abolishing copyright and patent laws without the rest *might* still
>      be
> 
>      net positive, but it would definitely have a mix of pros and cons.
> 
>      Aaron
> 
>      Snowdrift.coop
> 
>    I like Aaron's take.  Yasuaki: consider that if you remove copyright
>    without Aaron's suggestions, it would make all programs for which
>    source
>    code is not provided non-free software.  And, as Aaron has also
>    mentioned, some copyleft licences (such as the AGPL) prevent DRM in a
>    way.  Censorship in any form is bad for freedom.
> 
> References
> 
>    1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> libreplanet-discuss mailing list
> libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org
> https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
>