Re: [Fsfe-uk] Young Greens moving on FS

[Chris Croughton]

On Tue, Nov 23, 2004 at 09:20:59AM +0000, root wrote:

> Without copyright laws M****S*ft could and would take firefox, bundle
> it with their OS under their own brand name, introduce some
> non-standard functionality needed for it to work with the OS but
> without releasing the source for the changes, and then the original
> Mozilla effort would collapse as they would not be able to develop
> further improvements.

Why not?  They wouldn't be able to see the MS 'improvements' necessarily
(unless the source 'leaked'), but they could still continue their own
development, because without copyright MS would have no way of
preventing them.

> Nor would Mozilla get any credit for their good
> work. Same applies to GNU and lots of other good people.

They would get credit for the work in their own published code.  If
their product were better than the MS version they would get the credit
and MS get the criticism.  I would still use Firefox even if MS did let
their source out, because it's a better product.

> For that matter, neither GNU nor Mozilla or any of the others would
> have started without copyright, and imagine what a retrograde world
> that would be! It shows that getting rid of copyright only serves to
> *help* the monopolists.

That's an assertion, it 'shows' nothing without evidence.  Why would
they not have started without copyright?  Linus would still have written
the Linux kernel without copyright, because he did it as a project in
its own right (and Linux is popular even though free -- in all senses --
versions of Unix exist).  Netscape wasn't written because IE was
copyrighted, but because the source wasn't available, which is a
different matter.  OK, you wouldn't have the GPL being able to insist
that anyone who uses that code has to release their own, but then anyone
would be able to use any code they found (bought, stole, whatever) with
impunity.  Looking at how easily things 'leak', it wouldn't take long.

Of course, we might not have had MS, or the RIAA, but would that be so
bad?

> We *need* copyright.

Assertion, not evidence.  The world survived quite happily without it
for centuries, and creative things still happened.  There was a time
when composers and writers regularly 'borrowed' from each other, with no
copyright lawsuits, it did very little harm (and that harm was trivial
in comparison with the modern "you copied a few minutes of silence so
I'm going to sue you for lots of money").  The academic community did
similar until recently (and in some places still do).  Plagiarism isn't
a crime, it just leads to loss of status in the community when it is
discovered.

Personally, I'm in favour of limited copyright.  But I use the BSD and
Zlib licences (with appropriate modifications), so if anyone uses my
code in an executable and doesn't release the source I don't know or
care (unless they tell me, in which case I say "ooh, that's nice!").
I'm only concerned that if they do release the source then they say
which bits were mine, and don't claim that they wrote it when I did (or
conversely they change it and pretend that their bugs were my fault).

Chris C