No law is being broken by downloading/consuming what's commonly referred to as "pirated content" here in Switzerland. Downloading music, TV shows, movies and ebooks is legal for private use.
Companies which import storage media (e.g. DVDs) pay levies which are meant to be paid out to the rights holders. These rights can be asserted through collecting societies, e.g. Suissimage for filmmakers.
Interestingly the article right after that one is about the "decoding of computer programs" and says: Any person who has the right to use a computer program may obtain, either personally or through a third party, necessary information on the interfaces by decoding the program code using independently developed programs.
That after 10 years, what was licensed as open becomes even more open? I think only a minority of licensors and licensees would have a problem with that.
I think the GPL is a good license, both v2 and v3, for the restrictions they place to promote more FOSS and ensure software users the rights I would hope everyone believes they ought to have (e.g. the 4 freedoms to the software of devices they own via the anti-tivoization clauses).
Having said that, do most licensors use the GPL as opposed to licenses like BSD/MIT? And of those that use the GPL, do they do it for the restrictions it has as opposed to just following a collective habit?
Looking at what I have installed on the computer I'm on, GPL is hanging in there. I see:
The broader point being that every one of those licenses is just that -- a license. The terms of the license apply because the material is copyrighted.
And it's one place where you can directly specify your intent. In your license, say that everything reverts to the public domain in 5 years or 10 years. Grep away and show me how many licenses do that.
Varying durations for different types of media should be discussed as part of copyright reform. But simple statements like "10 years" reveal that people haven't thought things through.
Or maybe they have thought things through and they just don’t agree with your conclusion.
For people who choose a non-viral license, why not go straight to public domain? I see three reasons: 1. it avoids confusion and difficulty with countries that don’t recognize public domain. 2. it provides an explicit disclaimer of liability. 3. people like the requirement to credit the author or distributing organization.
1 wouldn’t be a problem with short copyright terms. 2 shouldn’t be either. I doubt someone would get anywhere trying to sue for damages caused by a defect in copyright-expired code. You’d lose 3 after 10 years but I’d guess open source authors see that as a nice-to-have rather than a hard requirement. The credit in proprietary software using non-viral open source is almost always buried in some “licenses” file nobody ever looks at anyway.
> In your license, say that everything reverts to the public domain in 5 years or 10 years. Grep away and show me how many licenses do that.
Look, I'm no lawyer, but my broader point is that something like that might not make much if any difference to most. It doesn't seem to me that there's much difference between the MIT license and public domain. The MIT just requires attribution and propagation of the license text.
If you add up the MIT licensed projects with others that have similar licenses, you might get to a 51%, at least according to the GitHub stats. I would think most of these people just picked a license by what other people picked. They don't really, really care to put the particular restrictions they did.
I'm not saying that 10 years is a good number, or that licenses are bad. I'm just saying that your pick of FOSS might be a poor example to argue about the need for long copyright terms.
The only ones among the FOSS community that likely care to have long copyright terms are those that pick GPL-type licenses, which have more substantial restrictions to ensure the freedoms of end-users.
Linux, Blender, and WordPress immediately spring to mind as software that would be in a very different place if their codebases reverted to public domain at the 10th year of their existence.
The Linux kernel has changed a lot in the last 10 years. Having all the code in it that's >= 10yo become public domain would only mean you'd be able to run an ancient kernel on old hardware without worrying about the GPL license terms.
How many are still running kermels from 10 years ago. even for mainline stuff with insignificant changes such that it is out of copyright (an interesting legal question itself), there is enough that is significant in new kernels
It's not about running a 10 year old Kernel, it's about a trillion dollar corporation owning a source snapshot, throwing 5,000 engineers at it, and not contributing anything back.
It also effectively turns GPL3 to GPL2 on a rolling 10 year basis.
People freaked about Tivo 20 years ago. Now imagine what kind of chaos Nvidia and Oracle could cause starting from even Ubuntu 14 or a 3.18 Kernel.
I'm surprised at people falling back into the BSD, MIT and GPL banter from 15 years ago.
Stop promoting your faves, stop generalizing about the motivations behind your non-faves, and to paraphrase John Lennon: imagine no licensing.
Now think a little deeper how that would change the motivations of developers, massive corporations, and VCs. Especially those that have given little but lip service to the whole movement.
There is a fairly major difference between a copyright of 100+ years, 10 years and 0 years. Right now we have 100+ years and thus we need GPL as a counter force.
If it was 10 years than we would likely still need GPL. The industry would likely change a bit towards more hostile design, so gpl would likely change to address those.
A world without copyright would also change things significantly. I would suspect more companies would turn to services in order to create restrictive TOS, which would create incentivizes for counter pushes with licenses like AGPL. We can already see this with AI and data scraping where traditional copyright currently do not exist. In the absent of copyright, companies are creating TOS that restrict the use of scraping for AI learning. Time will tell if such "licenses" will be enforceable, but in theory people are simply replacing copyright law with anti-hacking laws.
At the end there will likely always be a GPL-like concept as long there are legal frameworks that is used to restrict how creative works and tools are consumed, used and extended.
In the very early history of computing, it was still belived that copyright did not apply to computer programs. What large companies, like IBM, did was to require all customers to first sign a contract where the customer was forbidden, among many other things, to spread or copy the software.
Because copyright doesn't expire on human timescales and it's legal to use cryptographic methods to prevent compatible hardware/software, so things wouldn't be on an even playing field.
If you had to submit source code to the copyright office to be granted a copyright, and it expired after ~10 years (at which point the source is published), and anticompetitive, anticonsumer hardware locking methods were illegal, you'd be looking at a reasonable trade again, and copyleft would be essentially redundant.
To make 10 year copyright work with software, we would probably need to force companies to release the source code when the copyright expires. That way we keep an even playing field. Otherwise I think everything related to open source code would work out fine.
That effectively gives the copyright holder an exclusive ten year head start on a derivative work, because only they have the source to build on. It has to be open from day one for anything to work. And if you blow away copyright and therefore GPL, obviously the incentives change dramatically.
I'm not really worried about someone building on GPL in secret while waiting for the license to expire. They're still stuck ten years behind mainline. It's a pretty even playing field, and I don't think any side gets blown out.
If proprietary code had to be released read-only a year or two in advance of becoming public domain you'd have basically the same effect, but I would not expect the effect to be very big.
This analogy is absurd. Steel and rubber can't break laws either, but police regularly seize guns and vehicles used for committing crimes. Most developed countries also have some sort of sanctions regime that bars its citizens from transacting with certain entities. In most cases such sanctions don't even require a court order, the executive branch can usually unilaterally add entities to sanction lists.
Your counter analogy is also a bit cherry picked. Guns and vehicles used for committing crimes are seized, but the vehicle makers and gunsmiths are not ordered to go substantially out of their way to prevent criminals from using them, although they do stamp serial numbers. Also, ore and parts suppliers are not required to ensure that the buyers of their material comply with all legalities with the use of their materials. There’s a line of absurdity that this crosses
Physical goods aren’t the right analogy. Cloudflare provides services, not goods, which means Cloudflare is actively involved in the illegal activity.
There’s ample precedent for requiring companies to stop serving known criminals, and for requiring them to do some basic checks to try to avoid doing it in the first place. Just look at all the trouble that state-legal-but-federally-illegal marijuana retailers have with the financial system.
There are services where this is not expected. The post office delivers the mail regardless. But I don’t see why Cloudflare would be one of those universal services.
This seems like a typical tech company thing where they act like they have an inherent right to scale. If they actually checked what their services were being used for then they could easily spot this stuff and shut it down, but that costs money and takes time.
There actually had been some attempts to make smart guns mandatory while not completely working out all of their "kinks" yet. But to your point they actually have attempted this, to some degree. At first they were thinking only to prevent police from having their weapons used against them, but they had attempted to expand the scope. Although after the cops didn't want it either and the push for them seems to have waned.
>Your counter analogy is also a bit cherry picked. Guns and vehicles used for committing crimes are seized, but the vehicle makers and gunsmiths are not ordered to go substantially out of their way to prevent criminals from using them, although they do stamp serial numbers.
Internet companies aren't being asked to proactively block piracy sites either. They're asked to block IP addresses associated with known piracy sites, as determined by the courts.
>Also, ore and parts suppliers are not required to ensure that the buyers of their material comply with all legalities with the use of their materials. There’s a line of absurdity that this crosses
...only because the government aren't nervous about "ores and parts" getting in the hands of criminal or rival states. For many other items, suppliers are required to seek export licenses for certain goods[1], which is arguably an equal or higher bar than what you're describing. Such items aren't limited to stuff like explosives or munitions, it also includes benign stuff like certain metal alloys, and semiconductors. Also, Banks and other financial institutions are required to proactively look for sanctions evasion activity.
Police seizures would still exist without civil forfeiture. Moreover, in this case, unlike civil forfeiture, there's actually a court order backing the action.
They do if they're made illegal. Laws are just made up anyway and only relevant because people with the means to enforce them (aka guns) exist.
I think intellectual property laws need radical overhaul and reduction, and I think the current iteration is based on shakey philosophical principles anyway, but you won't get very far with straw men arguments, over-reductionism, or bad legal advice.
>>> . . . worried that the internet will get less and less free as tactics like this become more common
>> On the other hand, where do you draw the line with regards to lawbreaking?
> Do electrons on a wire or photons on glass break laws?
I’ll restate the point: laws that address the means and not the behavior are ripe for abuse. That some exist doesn’t justify their expansion.
Personally, I draw the line when an actual human being is harmed. If I see someone shoplifting from Walmart, no I didn't. If I see someone smashing the windows of a private car, yes I did.
I'm not sure that's the right line for society, but it's my personal line.
While I understand that this is your personal line and your decision, I don't understand how you mean "an actual human being is harmed".
Clearly no human being is harmed by smashing the windows of a private car. (assuming that neither the smasher nor anyone else gets hurt in the actual act of the smashing.) As a first order of approximation no human got harmed, they weren't even there when their car's window got smashed. As a second order approximation obviously we know the private car's owner will need to replace the windows which will cost them.
At the same time shoplifting from Walmart is also a cost which is born by everyone who shops at Walmart. Walmart will put that cost into the price of items. They will also put the cost of anti-theft items in the price of things too. Plus those anti-theft measures will harm the non-thieves by inconveniencing them. So everyone will pay just a bit more because of the shoplifting. These costs and inconveniences add up quickly.
Why is one of these costs within the line and the other is outside the line? What makes one of them "actual human being is harmed" while the other not?
It's a bit like the insurance market. We buy insurance because bearing the cost of misfortune is too much to bear as an individual.
In the same way, paying hundreds of dollars to fix a broken window is a significant burden to the individual owner. Paying an extra dollar on my Walmart bill is much easier to absorb.
Even if we grant everything you said, if you adopt that as your moral/legal system, the "extra dollar" will quickly snowball into hundreds to thousands of dollars as everyone realizes that they can steal with impunity.
>Personally, I draw the line when an actual human being is harmed. If I see someone shoplifting from Walmart, no I didn't. If I see someone smashing the windows of a private car, yes I did.
Both examples aren't exactly clear lines. The walmart example arguably affects "actual human beings" by raising prices, or at the very least, making the shopping experience worse. See: stores in the US where anything vaguely high value is locked up and you need to call an employee over to open it. The car window smashing example could result in no economic loss for the owner, if the owner has comprehensive 0 deductible insurance, or if the car is a company car. There's also plenty of activity that we ought to ban even if there's no "actual human being is harmed", eg. speeding, or tax evasion.
> If I see someone shoplifting from Walmart, no I didn't.
So to take a recent example from my city (one of those cities so full of rampant petty theft that stores now inconvenience everybody by locking up toiletries), you don’t have a problem with this rich asshole with a $150,000 salary and his two disrespectful, disruptive teenagers stealing steaks and Monsters from Walmart?
