http://techliberation.com/2009/03/18/liberty-anarchism-and-eben-moglen/
(From comments) ----- Tim, I must make three points in reply. First, you said, I think that we agree that Stallman and company are engaged in an entrepreneurial venture to build an alternative to proprietary software . I cannot agree that Stallman and Moglen are engaged in an entrepreneurial venture . Nor do I understand why you would use that term. Perhaps your dictionary defines entrepreneurial venture as an activity intended to makea socially productive activity so unrenumerative that it must be supported and subsidized by federal taxation. Or perhaps you have, (again, see, e.g., your post Selective Quotation in the Sydnor Paper), failed to review the relevant source material, like Stallmans early proposals for the long-term viability of GPL-software development. In either case, while I agree that the GPL has supported some entrepreneurial ventures, that was the result of accident, not the designs of FSF. Second, you say, I think that we agree that we should wait and see how well the [GPL] experiment works. I do agree with that statement, but I also think that it completely contradicts the message of your original post. For example, in that post, you noted, (correctly) that Stallman did not have to run to Congress to get permission to create useful software and release under the GPL. One difference between us may be that I may better understand just how critical that freedomwhich was conferred upon Stallman by copyright lawreally was. For example, suppose that Stallman really did have to run to Congress and get legislation enacted in order to be able to create software to be released under the GPL. And suppose also that Stallman had to get such legislation introduced and enacted when I happened to be, as I once was, the Counsel for Intellectual Property and Technology to the Chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. I would have taken the meeting, but its outcome would have been irrelevant. Odds are, I would have simply dismissed Stallman as a crank and pursued the matter no further. But even if I somehow caught GPL-fever upon first exposure, it seems almost incomprehensible that anyone could have been convinced to expend the political capital required to enact the GPL Act of 2004 in the face of the predictable opposition. So far, events suggest that either result would have been destructive. You are right, Tim, I am not optimistic about the future of the GPL: I think that many developers fail to realize that they owe Linus Torvalds for more than an OS kernel; he has also deferred some of the more destructive manifestations of Stallman and Moglens ideology. Someday, that dam may break. But regardless of whether or when it will, no developers ability to do what they think best with their work should turn upon whether it meets with my personal approval. And thats why I tend to believestronglythat copyright laws ought to be designed to empower and permit, as a practical matter, all business models that could be socially productive. Those who favor narrowing the range of business models permitted by copyrights seem endowed with a faith in their own powers of prediction that I cannot share. Third, and finally, we get to the fun part. You said, I found it most striking that you felt it was appropriate to alter my words (replacing monopoly with property and then put the results in quotation marks and [indignant sniffle] attribute them to me. Note that in the preceding sentence, as in my prior sentence [property], I have used brackets to indicate where I am characterizing, rather than quoting, your words. This practice is actually quite common. Here, I used it to very gently critique your implied insult to the intelligence of TLF readers. Since you missed the point, I will be more blunt. Tim, I replaced your term monopoly with my term [property] because I assume that anyone who calls himself a libertarian knows that monopoly right, property right, and exclusive right are generally just three different ways to say the same thing. But no need to take my word on this. Lets hearnot from Stallman or Moglenbut from an actual libertarian, Milton Friedman, from his book Capitalism and Freedom: [Copyrights and Patents] are different, because they can equally be regarded as defining property rights. In a literal sense, if I have a property right to a particular piece of land, I can be said to have a monopoly with respect to that piece of land defined and enforced by the government. So, Tim, why do you insist upon using the term monopoly right? Frankly, I suspect that you do so in the hope that it will mislead some TLF readers who are just not quite as clever as you. You and I both know that most people, as a result of the terms specialized meaning within antitrust law, associate monopoly with market power or even unreasonable abuse of market power. Consequently, most who use the term monopoly right when discussing copyrights do so because they hope to confuse and mislead the gullible through this oh-so-clever rhetorical device that makes the concept of a property right sound sinister and scary. Granted, Tim, you may using the term monopoly right because you genuinely believe that all copyrights act as economic monopolies within the meaning of antitrust law. So tell me, Tim: Are you asserting that the mere possession of a copyright inevitably confers market power within the meaning of the law of antitrust? Are you going farther, and asserting that the mere possession of a copyright inevitably results in the abuse of market power within the meaning of the law of antitrust? These are not rhetorical questions, Tim: If you can, you need to explain your use of this Scary Synonym. And if you insist on adopting the fiction that copyrights are not really property rights, (and I advise you to check your sources before you do) then please be so kind as to either concoct some more neutral alternative, or adopt one of those already concocted by others. But if you insist upon rhetorical overreach, then why not go whole hog and adopt the Free-Culture-Movement practice of inserting the term monopoly into a new acronym that spells out the name of a mythical monster. My personal favorites are G.O.L.E.Ms. (Government-Originated Legally-Imposed Monopolies) and I.M.Ps. (Imposed Monopoly Privileges). These will really scare the dullards, if not the readers of TLF. Having explained why I used the brackets, let me admit that as a general matter, I think this sort of rhetoric unpersuasive and ineffective. As a result, if the term monopoly right is important to you, Tim, I will faithfully reproduce it when quoting you in the future. Unless, that is, I decide to re-make the points set out above. --Tom ----- Tim Lee's dull response: ----- Tom, brackets are commonly used to either summarize a long paragraph or to make a quotation grammatical in its new context. It's totally inappropriate to use brackets as a way of making an ideological point. Given your history of misrepresenting others' views, I think you should be particularly careful in this respect. I choose to call copyright a monopoly right to emphasize that it is a statutory right created by Congress. This is very different from ordinary property rights, which tend to emerge spontaneously and are only recognized and secured by government after they are recognized by civil society. And you totally missed my point with regard to Stallman and Congress. The point of the GPL is to ensure that downstream distributors of GPLed software do not use copyright or patent laws to restrict users' freedom to use that software. In a world without copyright, the GPL would likely not be needed because users would have that freedom by default. Certainly, in a world without copyright Stallman wouldn't need Congress's help to create his software. ----- Facts: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-versus-community.html <quote> RMS: ... Meanwhile for software, I suspect that a three year copyright would be enough. you see if each version of the programme remains copyrighted for three years after its release well, unless the company is in real bad trouble they should have a new version before those three years are up and there will be a lot of people who will want to use the newer version, so if older versions are all becoming free software automatically, the company would still have a business with the newer version. Now this is a compromise as I see it, because it is a system in which not all software is free, but it might be an acceptable compromise, after all, if we had to wait three years in some cases for programs to become free... well, that's no disaster. To be using three years old software is not a disaster. [...] AM4: The problem with this change in the copyright laws for three would be that you wouldn't get the sources. RMS: Right. There would have also to be a condition, a law that to sell copies of the software to the public the source code must be deposited somewhere so that three years later it can be released. So it could be deposited say, with the library of congress in the US, and I think other countries have similar institutions where copies of published books get placed, and they could also received the source code and after three years, publish it. And of course, if the source code didn't correspond to the executable that would be fraud, and in fact if it really corresponds then they ought to be able to check that very easily when the work is published initially so you're publishing the source code and somebody there says alright "dot slash configure dot slash make" and sees if produces the same executables and uh. So you're right, just eliminating copyright would not make software free. AM5: Um libre RMS: Right. </quote> http://www.tlug.jp/docs/rms.html <quote> HY: Hmmm. Then tell me what you think about pirated software. RMS: I don't call this copying "piracy", because that is a propaganda word. I don't think it is wrong to copy and share information. Governments can pass laws against it, but that does not make it wrong, just illegal. An unauthorized copy of a proprietary program has the same drawbacks as an authorized copy. If you want to make more copies and share them, you have to do it in secret; and you cannot get the source code. So I think that unauthorized copies are not much better than authorized copies. The only good thing about the unauthorized copy is that you avoid giving money to the owner. This is good, because the owner does not deserve a reward for making software proprietary. </quote> regards, alexander. -- http://gng.z505.com/index.htm (GNG is a derecursive recursive derecursion which pwns GNU since it can be infinitely looped as GNGNGNGNG...NGNGNG... and can be said backwards too, whereas GNU cannot.) _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
