[License-discuss] Shortest copyleft licence

Rick Moen rick at linuxmafia.com
Sat Apr 4 13:47:51 UTC 2015


Quoting Tim Makarios (tjm1983 at gmail.com):

[...] 
> And that's sort of my point, really.

A lot of talk about convenience.  Thank you for that, I guess.

And thank you for having reminded us that literary works available under
redistrubution-permitting licences such as CC-BY-SA have typically been 
put into machine-readable form by _somebody_.  So, even though I was
guesstimating that, as a fast typist, I'd have been able (if my OCRing
facilities didn't suffice) to type in, and correct, the full text of
_Pride and Prejudice_ in a week, creating plaintext suitable for markup,
that work would be seldom necessary.

So, convenience, yay.  I wish you luck with that campaign.

>> I'm sorry, but _who_ exactly are you saying is advocating abolition of
>> copyright?  And what colour is the sky in their vicinity?
> 
> Well, Karl Fogel [1, 2], for example, unless I've misunderstood him.

FWIW, seems to me, you very much have.   The nub of Karl's argument is
typified by this paragraph near 0the end of the first cited piece:

  The proprietary stream cannot survive forever, in the face of such
  competition. The abolition of copyright law is optional; the real force
  here is creators freely choosing to release their works for unrestricted
  copying, because it's in their interests to do so. At some point, it
  will be obvious that all the interesting stuff is going on in the free
  stream, and people will simply cease dipping into the proprietary one.
  Copyright law may remain on the books formally, but it will fade away in
  practice, atrophied from disuse.




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