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Copyright is fine. Software patents are not. Copyright allows you to decide how your code is distributed. Software patents restrict innovation in a manner that

Copyright is fine. Software patents are not. Copyright allows you to decide how your code is distributed. Software patents restrict innovation in a manner that was never intended to be possible.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
Copyright is a functionally eternal state-granted monopoly on data that's trivially copied. It's a monopoly on bits, numbers. Not only is it an utterly absurd notion, enforcing copyright in the 21st century requires that we give up our computing freedom.
- drran 5y ago
  Copyright is a functionally eternal state-granted monopoly on data that's hard to produce. It's a monopoly on bits, numbers. Not only is it an utterly helpful notion, enforcing copyright in the 21st century helps us to protect our computing freedom.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    > data that's hard to produce Yes. All human intellectual work comes down to discovering a really big number. This labor has immense value. The data itself can be trivially copied and distributed worldwide at essentially zero cost. Society needs to find new ways to value this human intellectual labor. New ways that don't depend on forcing artificial scarcity on the result. > Not only is it an utterly helpful notion Helpful to whom? To the monopolists, sure. Meanwhile everybody else has been robbed of their fair use and public domain rights. > enforcing copyright in the 21st century helps us to protect our computing freedom Absolutely not. The number one reason why computers are no longer under our control is copyright. It is impossible to stop copyright infringement if we can create and run whatever software we want. They must have mechanisms that stop us from running unapproved software in order to have any hope of enforcing anything. Otherwise it's trivial for computers to share data with each other, it's as natural as a river flowing.
    - drran 5y ago
      You can convince copyright holders to assign the copyright to you, e.g. by paying them money, and then release their work using a permissive license, like Mozilla Foundation or Apache foundation are doing. If you unlike their software or hardware, then just stop buying it and buy or support free software and hardware. Freedom is not free.
      - matheusmoreira 5y ago
        > You can convince copyright holders to assign the copyright to you, e.g. by paying them money, and then release their work using a permissive license That's a half-measure with limited impact. Why spend considerable resources freeing up a small number of works? The right thing to do is to abolish copyright straight up. At the very least, fix copyright by significantly reducing duration so that copyright ownership is reassigned to the public automatically at zero cost regardless of what monopolists want. > just stop buying it People won't have a choice. They'll either buy locked down hardware or they won't be able to consume anything. Streaming services have already started enforcing DRM rules that prevent owners of free software and hardware from consuming their content and it's illegal to circumvent this even if you pay for it.
- unityByFreedom 5y ago
  Copyright is what makes it possible for you to sue someone if they copy your startup's code. Without it you have no other recourse if an employee wants to sell your whole codebase to a competitor, short of catching them in the act, which is not practical compared to enforcing copyright.

Copyright is fine. Software patents are not. Copyright allows you to decide how your code is distributed. Software patents restrict innovation in a manner that was never intended to be possible.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

Copyright is a functionally eternal state-granted monopoly on data that's trivially copied. It's a monopoly on bits, numbers. Not only is it an utterly absurd notion, enforcing copyright in the 21st century requires that we give up our computing freedom.

drran 5y ago
Copyright is a functionally eternal state-granted monopoly on data that's hard to produce. It's a monopoly on bits, numbers. Not only is it an utterly helpful notion, enforcing copyright in the 21st century helps us to protect our computing freedom.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > data that's hard to produce Yes. All human intellectual work comes down to discovering a really big number. This labor has immense value. The data itself can be trivially copied and distributed worldwide at essentially zero cost. Society needs to find new ways to value this human intellectual labor. New ways that don't depend on forcing artificial scarcity on the result. > Not only is it an utterly helpful notion Helpful to whom? To the monopolists, sure. Meanwhile everybody else has been robbed of their fair use and public domain rights. > enforcing copyright in the 21st century helps us to protect our computing freedom Absolutely not. The number one reason why computers are no longer under our control is copyright. It is impossible to stop copyright infringement if we can create and run whatever software we want. They must have mechanisms that stop us from running unapproved software in order to have any hope of enforcing anything. Otherwise it's trivial for computers to share data with each other, it's as natural as a river flowing.
  - drran 5y ago
    You can convince copyright holders to assign the copyright to you, e.g. by paying them money, and then release their work using a permissive license, like Mozilla Foundation or Apache foundation are doing. If you unlike their software or hardware, then just stop buying it and buy or support free software and hardware. Freedom is not free.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      > You can convince copyright holders to assign the copyright to you, e.g. by paying them money, and then release their work using a permissive license That's a half-measure with limited impact. Why spend considerable resources freeing up a small number of works? The right thing to do is to abolish copyright straight up. At the very least, fix copyright by significantly reducing duration so that copyright ownership is reassigned to the public automatically at zero cost regardless of what monopolists want. > just stop buying it People won't have a choice. They'll either buy locked down hardware or they won't be able to consume anything. Streaming services have already started enforcing DRM rules that prevent owners of free software and hardware from consuming their content and it's illegal to circumvent this even if you pay for it.
unityByFreedom 5y ago
Copyright is what makes it possible for you to sue someone if they copy your startup's code. Without it you have no other recourse if an employee wants to sell your whole codebase to a competitor, short of catching them in the act, which is not practical compared to enforcing copyright.