Miles, the whole point about discussing copyright law involves
acknowledging that we're talking about changing the law. Thus, it's all
rhetorical at this point and we shouldn't take tons of time with it. My
point initially is to distinguish between talking about the way the law
ought to be vs talking about the status quo.
We must acknowledge that copyleft today relies on copyright law. We do
not need to suggest that we support copyright law, however. If we had
the power to change the law, we could institute other protections for
software freedom that were not tied in this hacky way to copyright.
Since we can't easily change the law, that's not a discussion worth
going into detail on. It's just important that we politically distance
ourselves from copyright apologists and maximalists.
On 03/09/2015 04:34 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
Will Hill wrote:
I'd rather deliver a knock out blow to them by removing copyright
protection
for non free software.
For those who are advocating this, can I assume that you realize this
would require a change to the law, unless authors explicitly release
their software to the "public domain?" (Works are automatically
copyrighted by their author, unless you go to lengths to avoid it.) I
expect the likelihood of such a legal change is just about nil.
And... if you DO release code to the public domain, that leaves others
free to make a few modifications, and/or bundle that code with other
code, and copyright the whole mess.
Copyleft, among other things, is a way to prevent that kind of abuse.
Miles Fidelman