Subj : Re: GNU Public Licences Revisited (again)
To   : comp.programming
From : David Golden
Date : Sat Aug 27 2005 06:47 pm

Randy Howard wrote:

>  In your loose analogy, Ford, GM, BMW, etc. would be
> the one complaining about the copy of the car, not you.

Hey, so do music distribution monopoly holders now that their monopolies
are unenforceable.  Musicians and composers who have any sense can
still make a decent living. Car designers could still make a decent
living in the presence of magic car cloning rays (which are probably
only a matter of time. At the quantum level, there are the no-cloning
theorems, but at the macroscopic level, you certainly don't care
if a car and its clone are very quantum-state similar, only that
they are similar to a certain level of lumped approximation, so
replicators are merely an engineering problem now.)

And how about the "how to drive" thing? -
software is a very precise teaching of instructions for someone else's
machine. (like a set of glasses enhances your vision, your computer
enhances your logical/mathematical ability - I or anyone else of normal
intelligence could run an x86 binary, at least when printed out has a
hexdump, given a pen and paper and an x86 reference, totally unaided by
computer... though it would be rather boring to do.)  

>> I thus simply regard it as best to consider the physical substrates
>> of particular copies of information as property.
> 
> Not all property is physical.  Perhaps you have heard of
> "intellectual property rights"?  

Yes, that is usually a catch-all term used by those who wish to muddy
the waters of all sorts of different rights, trying to making it more
difficult to argue for trademark but against copyright, for example,
often wrongly asserting that if you're against one I"P" right, you're
against them all.

> I love the way people throw around the word 'wrong' when they
> really mean 'my opinion'.  You thinking it is wrong, does not
> make it so for the general population, 

In my country's history, thousands of people are recorded to have 
died in the battle of Cul Dreimne against the world's first recorded
copyright law.   Don't think the "general  population" will just
blindly support someone's claimed "right" to destroy their freedom of
information by "owning" information forever:  especially not since the
deal was supposed to be a monopoly for a "limited time", but those in
power are happy to render that meaningless (See Eldred vs. Ashcroft.).

The "general population" isn't necessarily stupid and is quite capable
of deciding deal's off, copyright law is wrong, if they want to.

.