copyright discussion

[Ian Lance Taylor]

It's common practice to quote part of the e-mail to which you are
replying, as I am doing here, in order to maintain some context in the
conversation.

It is also polite to set your mailer to not send HTML mail to a
mailing list such as this one.

JEETUN6 at aol.com writes:

> Many thanks for seeing what I was trying to say. When I heards of this open 
> source movement I was intrigued to see how they could do what they do without 
> intellectual property protection, a institution that they attack so much. How 
> much of a surprise then was it to discover that they actually used copyright 
> towhat they want to do. It was merely the use of copyright in a different 
> way. From my uniniated perspective, it appears to be that your complaint is 
> against the use by others of copyright rather than copyright itself, but that 
> this distinction has been ignored and has turned into a witchhunt against 
> copyright. 

I hope you are learning that the truth is more nuanced than the straw
man you are describing.  I've been a member of the free software
community for a long time, and I am not aware of any witchhunt against
copyright.  I think there is a movement both within and without the
free software community which one could fairly describe as a witchhunt
against software patents.  But copyright, software patents, and
hardware patents are not the same thing.

There is also a movement both within and without the free software
community to retain certain aspects of copyright which are being
challenged by laws like the DMCA, such as the right to fair use.  But
I don't think there are too many people who feel that copyright should
be abolished in toto.

Richard Stallman does not speak for everybody in the free software
movement.  But most people do listen to him.  Here are some comments
of his on copyright, written in 1996:
    http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/reevaluating-copyright.html
There are more papers on that web site on IP issues.

> how can I ensure that I get e-mailed further discussions on this list?

You can subscribe to it:
    http://www.opensource.org/licenses/index.html#list

Ian
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