[lug] Panel Discussion - Software Licenses

[Neal McBurnett]

At the meeting last night on licenses, I was glad to hear Jason
Haislmaier describe the GNU General Public License (GPL) as
essentially creating a whole new category of protected intellectual
property, with a place alongside patents, copyrights, trademarks, and
trade secrets.  The name "copyleft" is really appropriate.

I.e. the GPL creates a domain or category of speech and ideas that has
its own set of legal protections.  It uses copyright law to do this,
but in a very creative way, for the direct benefit of the public.

See http://www.fsf.org/licenses/licenses.html for the background
and full text of the various Free Software Foundation licenses
including the GPL.

The Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/aboutus/) is an
important movement to extend these ideas to promote the free flow of
creativity via similar categories for music, writings, images, and
other works.

This whole notion is strongly supported by the short article below on
the "Failure of copyright to establish a public domain" which points
out that granting copyrights to object code and unpublished source
code does not help anyone learn about software.  They are thus far
less worthy of protection than books and images.

It is one comment in a discussion on:
  Open Source And The Obligation To Recycle
  http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/03/1820233&mode=nested

Note the Constitutional language which allows Copyright restrictions
and patent monopolies to be imposed in the first place, in order
to promote progess:

 Constitution Section 8
  The Congress shall have Power...
  To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for
  limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their
  respective Writings and Discoveries;

I see them stifling progress in many ways these days....

Cheers,

Neal McBurnett <neal at bcn.boulder.co.us>
http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/
GPG/PGP signed and/or sealed mail encouraged.  Keyid: 2C9EBA60


Failure of copyright to establish a public domain

 by jms on 02-01-03 12:35 (Score:5, Insightful) (#2780462) 
 (User #11418 Info) [ Neutral ] 

 This article illustrates the complete failure of the only
 constitutional purpose of modern copyright law with respect to
 software -- a failure to establish a public domain, in both senses of
 the word.

 The first sense is the idea of public domain as "uncopyrighted" or
 "expired copyright." Had Congress resisted the urge to tamper with
 the copyright laws in 1976, things would be different. Under the
 pre-1976 copyright regime, copyright lasted for 28 years, with the
 option to re-register for an additional 28 year term. Under this
 system, abandonware from the early 1970s would be now regularly
 entering the public domain. In two or so years, we would start to see
 the first generation of abandoned PC software enter the public domain
 -- old Apple II software, games and system software from long-lost
 companies. Instead, by repeatedly extending copyright, and removing
 the renewal requirement, Congress has essentially consigned the
 history of computer software to destruction. Very few of us will live
 long enough to be allowed to legally copy the software that was
 written before many of us were even born. Even if we did live long
 enough, the media will have long decayed, any software from the early
 days of personal computers will only survive as illegally made
 copies. In essence, Congress has criminalized the work of the
 historian and archivist, with no real benefit to anyone.

 There is another sense of the "public domain" in which the copyright
 laws have even more drastically failed. This is the sense of the
 "public domain" as "the body of work available to the public to read
 and learn from." The problem is that by allowing copyright on object
 code, and by allowing software publishers to treat source code as
 trade secrets, in essence, computer programmers are forced to learn
 their trade from scratch. Imagine if a student expressed an interest
 in becoming a writer, and was told, "If you want to be a writer, you
 will never be permitted to legally read books written by successful,
 popular authors." I doubt that the result would be better literature,
 but that our public policy with respect to software -- both by
 attaching copyright protection to object code, and by allowing the
 attachment of licenses to software that forbid reverse-engineering --
 a technical term for "reading" software.

 The primary purpose of copyright was to place knowledge into the
 public domain. That's why patents must be openly published, and why,
 originally, only published works were eligible for copyright. Now,
 with copyright protection automatically attaching to all works,
 whether or not they are ever published in a form that adds to the
 public domain, we are back to the bad old days of proprietary
 licensing of -- and the subsequent destruction of learning and
 knowledge -- the very problem that copyright was designed to put an
 end to!

 I believe that the real revolution in free software is not a better
 business model. It is not the sense of community that it fosters. It
 is not the reduced costs or the improved quality.

 The real revolution in free software is that it in effect
 reestablishes the public domain that has been systematically
 destroyed by Congress in passing ever more restrictive, destructive
 copyright legislation. In the year 2002, free software is the public
 domain. It's the software that you can download, study, modify,
 improve, sell, and give away. It's the software that you can learn
 from, instead of just use.

 Unlike proprietary software, free software is the software that
 promotes the progress of science and the useful arts, and anyone who
 is interested in promoting progress in the field of computer science
 should strongly consider releasing their software under the GPL,
 after its commercial potential has been exhausted.

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