Subj : Re: GNU Public Licences Revisited (again)
To   : comp.programming
From : David Golden
Date : Tue Sep 06 2005 03:39 am

Gerry Quinn wrote:


>> Real commons were considered joint, common,
>> property, not "not property" and the joint owners had agreed
>> mechanisms for making decisions about them.
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
> 
> Exactly. 

So, you can tell the difference between communal ownership and no
ownership now, then? heh.

> When ownership was destroyed, the commons were soon after 
> destroyed too.  

"destroyed" in what sense?  When an "enclosure act" was used
to eliminate access to the commons, effectively destroying any existing
"joint ownership" (or at least access+use) right, by definition the
commmons was destroyed; but the land persisted, just as someone's
private field- still owned.

But once again, discussion of real commons is pointless. "tragedy of the
commons" has not been shown applicable to information itself, because
information is not rivalrous.  If I know "A" and you know "B", if we
share information (pass on physical copies), we both know "A" and "B".

> When the sale value of 
> information is at most that of its value to a single user (which is
> what you want),

Rubbish.  If nothing else, do you think purchasers incapable of
grouping together?  The internet has lowered the barriers for doing
that significantly, and it's now commonplace for such funding drives to
take place. Not all are "successful", of course, but that's the free
market for you. 

> "Pointed out"?  I've seen nothing but a parade of half-baked
> assertions!  

Propaganda 101: accuse others of your own crimes. Wake me up when
you stop apparently just taking it for granted you're entitled to some
sort of monopoly on information distribution post-disclosure.

> What you cannot do is plagiarise my speech. 

Go look up plagiarism, dolt.   If you write something, and I claim
to have authored it, that is plagiarism. It doesn't have much to do with
copyright. You do not need copyright law, the power to restrict others
from sharing infrormation with others, for plagiarism to be illegal and
fraudulent.  Note that I did not argue against some sort of right to be
identified as an author of a work.

With plagiarism still fraudulent, but without copyright, if people want
another work of similar quality, then they know it's a better bet to
pay you, not me for the work of creation. If you want to be paid
indefinitely, just do new work.  That is quite sufficient "ownership"
over information. 

> Copyright law, i.e. IP, does not interfere in any way with free
> speech, and in fact the two work perfectly hand in hand.
> 

They quite clearly don't. Plenty of evidence to the contrary, e.g. the
suppression of cryptographic research in the Sklyarov case, the
suppression of criticism of Scientology.  

You simply want to be able to control others' communication.

As it says in the freenet docs:
http://freenet.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=philosophy
"Freenet's aim is to allow two or more people who wish to share
information, to do so."

That is freedom of speech. Maybe you meant it in some more limited
sense.

> By contrast, the 'information freedom' you propose is reminiscent of
> nothing so much as a mob of looters grabbing crates of beer from a
> wrecked shop.

If beer is taken, less beer remains. Beer number conservation. If a copy
of a beer is taken, that's more beer in the world. Beer number
nonconservation. The production of novel beer information patterns is
still a potentially lucrative career, even without the ability to
prevent beer copying.

.