On Sat, 6 May 2000, James Sutherland wrote:
> On Fri, 5 May 2000, Richard Stallman wrote:
>
> > The concept of inalienable rights, rights that you cannot cede because
> > everyone should always have them, is a fundamental part of the legal
> > system of the US and many other countries.
>
> Yes. Now find me the section of the US Constitution, or the European
> Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees you the right to MY source
> code?
There's this whole section on this funny thing called 'free
speech'... If you think of C as another language, then it is speech
as well. Now, under Article I, Section 8 of the US constitution you
are granted the right to have a limited-time monopoly on speech.
This idea appears to have been Madison's. He and Jefferson
sent a number of letters to each other regarding the subject. Jefferson
was initially very much against the idea of any kind of legal monopoly,
but eventually came around given the requirement that it be for a limited
time.
The idea here was to allow an author (or really, a publisher) to
recoup the costs required to create and publish their work, in order to
encourage them to create and publish more. The problem currently is that
copyright law has been warped to be specifically what Jefferson was worried
about it becoming: a form of legal monopoly on speech.
The reason is simply this: originally copyright only covered a
work for somewhere between 14 and 19 years. It now covers a work for the
life of the author, plus 70 years beyond the end of his life. This means
that no one else can create a work based on the original work for the
period of time it is under copyright without specific authority from the
copyright owner.
Some examples of this are the poems of Robert Frost, novels
such as The Great Gatsby, and a very important to one very large company,
Mickey Mouse.
Mickey Mouse would have come into the public domain in 2004, but
the Sonny Bono act of 1998 (IIRC) extended copyright protection,
retroactively, another 20 years. Disney lobbied great amounts to get this
bill passed, the reason? Mickey Mouse, according to some reports, brought
in $8 billion in revenue for Disney in 1998.
> I agree that the "right" to give up your inalienable rights is a
> fundamentally flawed concept. I just don't agree that your access to my
> source code without my consent is such a right...
Access to your specific source code may or may not be an issue,
it depends on if you publish it, in whatever form, and intend to maintain
a monopoly on it. If you write something, stick it in a box and bury it,
obviously it is no one's right to come on to your property, dig up that
box and read what you have written.
If you publish your work, however, you will probably want to put
it under copyright, at least if you have any intent on selling it. Now,
if you put it under copyright you are granted a limited-time monopoly on
your work. This limited-time monopoly limits the free speech rights of
others, and to make up for this fact you are required to give something
back in the end. This means that your work, at the end of its copyright
term, is placed in the public domain for others to be able to use.
The whole idea here is to encourage you to publish your work.
If you do not publish it and distribute it, then it does not promote
the sciences. The constitution is making a compramise, a deal if you
will, with you. You publish and copyright your work, and you can make
money off of it for a limited time, but you have to give up your rights
to that work in the end.
> My only real objection to the GPL is that it seems hypocritical: it denies
> one person the right NOT to publish their source code, in order to grant a
> third party some rights to this person's source. Using GPL software as a
> user grants me rights; using it as a programmer removes them.
The idea and purpose of the GPL, at least as I interpret it, is an
attempt to encourage (force) people to do the right thing(tm). To encourage
them to not take all their work and stick it in a box and bury it, but to
allow others to use their work and improve on it, in order to furthur the
sciences and abilities of the human race as a whole.
Stephen Frost
PS: Articles you, or any others interested, may want to check out, and
where I got some of my information from follow:
http://www.boston.com/globe/magazine/8-29/featurestory1.shtml
http://promo.net/pg/vol/pd.html
http://www.reason.com/0003/fe.jw.copy.html
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