[Fsuk-manchester] Copyright opinions

[Luke Taylor]

Michael and Lucy sparked an interesting discussion about how copyright harms free software:http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pirate-party.html

Naturally a copyright of (say) 10 years would mean that Linux 2.0.37 and GCC 2.95.2 and any other free software published more than 10 years ago would have their copylefts expire. RMS suggests that this would be acceptable if proprietary software had to surrender their source if the distribution was more than 10 years old.

Two questions for y'all:

1) Have I understood how this works correctly? Would everything based on Linux 2.0.37 (ie. 2.6.31-15 ) become effectively BSD's or just the older incarnation?

2) Would you oppose a law to reduce all copyright to 15 years (with no clauses forcing proprietary software to surrender the source code)? Yes it would harm free software a bit (Or a lot? I honestly don't know how useful a 15 year old kernel would be to a modern proprietary developer) but think how much culture would be freed! Novels/music/plays/art etc.

3) If your answer to (2) is no, what about 25 years? How many years would you support? I guess that nobody here would support the current regime which is life of the creator plus 70 years. (Correct me if I'm wrong!)

Just bouncing ideas around. I definitely don't know enough to form any kind of confident opinions but I am interested in seeing some discussion and seeing what you all think.

Luke

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