Subj : Re: GNU Public Licences Revisited (again)
To   : comp.programming
From : David Golden
Date : Thu Sep 22 2005 01:06 am

lilburne wrote:

> I've already shown that beyond the trite and obvious the article is
> nonsense.

Must be all trite and obvious, then, leaving no nonsense.
Given it's a pretty damn straightforward exploration of meaning of
"value", "trite and obvious" might well describe it.

> That is what the copyright is about. The contract between you and the
> copyrighted software producer is that you don't fscking copy and
> redistribute it. 

Then a contract to that effect might be agreed.
Statutory copyright is imposed extracontractually.

> The role that  statutary law has played on copyright has 
> been to limit it.  

Nope, statutory law created a different kind of limited copyright, then
the common law kind disliked by authors and loved by publishers was
eliminated, or at least very, very much diminished to only covering
works prior to publication, leaving only the statutory kind (well,
there's another ghost of the old kind, AFAIK, if there's a
never-published work over which the statutory copyright has expired,
under current law the first publisher has a shortish copyright
or something like that)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donaldson_v._Beckett 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheaton_v._Peters

> Apparently yes.
> http://www.mises.org/rothbard/ethics/sixteen.asp

I don't mindlessly agree with everything on mises.org -
note that in that article, for example:
"In that case, Brown has granted to Green not absolute ownership of the
knowledge of his invention, but conditional ownership"

But I do not hold that Brown can have ownership of "knowledge" to grant,
conditionally or otherwise. e.g. I would amend the article author's

'There is no ?right to know?; there is only the right of the knower to
either disseminate his knowledge or to keep silent.'

to 

'There is no ?right to know?; there is only the right of the knower to
either disseminate knowledge known to him or to keep silent.'

i.e. I do not think knowledge "itself" is or even can be his (or anyone
else's), only the particular physical copy he has in his brain, though
he can indeed choose to disclose the knowledge or otherwise.

.