Battling the Copyright Monster
Law professors Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins have produced a comic book Bound By Law? Tales From the Public Domain which gives good examples of some of the terrible barriers copyright law has placed in the way of documentary filmmakers. Though these authors are not radicals or very principled (and of course, like mainstreamers, their approach is soft-utilitarian), the piece helps to illustrate some of the immense costs and restrictions on liberty imposed by copyright law.
Comments (9)
Previously posted on the Mises Economics Blog: http://blog.mises.org/archives/004818.asp
Published: June 19, 2006 7:05 PM
And on the other side of the spectrum, courtesy somethingawful ALoD:
http://www.captaincopyright.ca/
Published: June 19, 2006 10:24 PM
Boingboing.net gave some nice demonstrations of all the other copyrights and trademarks Captain Copyright is violating. :) Oh the irony. The fact is, you can't hum a song, draw a picture, or write a software program without violating someone's imaginary property. Where's the utilitarian argument now?
Published: June 20, 2006 6:15 AM
One (no incorporeal rights) doesn't follow from the other (foolish copyright laws which don't recognize the rights of independent developers).
Ironically, there's a similar problem with GPL - you can't modify and sell stuff that's licensed under the GPL (hundreds of programs) - effectively forcing out all produce-for-profit entrepreneurs who would add functionality and brand an existing public domain codebase. That's a "copyright" of sorts which tends to play into MSFT's hands.
Published: June 20, 2006 11:06 AM
Jim B, You are indeed free to take a GPL'd program, modify it, burn it to a CD rom, and sell it. What you are not allowed to do is sue the pants off of and prosecute anyone who does the same thing to that CD. Of course, almost nobody tries to make money this way but that's the point. A copyright world forces the market to center arround information controlls where a non copyright world forces it to center arround information services.
Copyrights are not like regular property rights that have natural limits in supply and demand. People need to stop looking at copyrights like a free market property right, and need to start looking at it like a government microregulation on how people use information.
Published: June 20, 2006 10:47 PM
David C - maybe I misunderstand: "b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License."
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
Rest of agreement doesn't seem to allow for modification and sale, retaining full rights to the modified source.
Published: June 21, 2006 12:59 PM
Jim B, the key word is licenced, not distributed. Some versions of Red Hat enterprise Linux sell for over $1000 if you try to order the CD's from Red Hat. I am free to copy and distribute that, but Red Hat won't offer support unless I buy it from them.
Published: June 21, 2006 1:45 PM
David - Pretty sure they can't modify Linux code & sell it. Let me know if I'm wrong ...
Published: June 22, 2006 1:21 PM
"Pretty sure they can't modify Linux code & sell it. Let me know if I'm wrong ..."
Oh yeah, you're wrong. Sure can. Or rather, they can _try_. For instance, Red Hat Enterprise Edition as David C. mentions above.
But then someone turned around and took everything in RHE that wasn't Red Hat corporation proprietary (which is some, like the install routines, but not much) and packaged for nothing.
There are several embedded systems houses that are taking the basic Linux kernel code, stripping out what they don't use, even adding bits and pieces, and selling it. What they cannot do is lie about it and claim it as their own. They don't.
Published: May 7, 2007 11:39 PM