<quote who="Jeremy Hankins" date="Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 09:06:39AM -0500"> > The only possibility that I can think of is to use an idea like "public > performance". I.e., if the work is "publicly performed", source > distribution requirements would apply. Public performance would > probably have to be defined in a way that takes into account the purpose > for which people are using the software (i.e., their primary purpose is > to use the software, as opposed to using the software only to facilitate > access to something else).
This is a *very* bad idea IMHO for two reasons. First, it's a poor reading of copyright law. Software is, at least in the US, a literary work. A classical example of copyrighteable public performance of other types of literary works is reading the text of the poem in a public park. To make the jump from this to interacting with a piece of software over the net is creating new law. The bigger problem is that by arguing for this type of new law, we are arguing for an expansion of existing copyright law. I'm sure that MS and many other ASPs who want to bring copyright into the interactions between software on their servers and their users would welcome this. We should not. Arguing for stronger copyright as a means of getting stronger copyleft is a self-defeating, poor strategically, and ethically indefensible. Now, if through no effort of our own and inspite of our community's opposition, copyright ends up being extended in this way, we should consider taking advantage of it in the same way that we are using copyright as the basis of copyleft. Of course, there's a world of difference between using a bad thing against itself and arguing for a bad thing because we might be able to do so. If this issue is truly important to us, I think we should be able to sustain a minor barrier to modification that falls below the "loss of freedom threshold" in the same way that GPL(2)(c), the advertising clause, copyleft, unremoveable copyright statements and licenses, and other sometimes annoying clauses that we believe support our movement and are ultimately in the best interests of software freedom. I'm not claiming that I've found language that does this. I am saying that I think it's possible. Regards, Mako -- Benjamin Mako Hill [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mako.cc/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
