Quoting MJ Ray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
So-called "non-commercial" terms like Creative Commons are usually
really one-sided, unfair and anti-commercial terms: *I* can be paid
for use of this work, *you* cannot be. It's a classic
free-only-for-those-rich-enough type of restrictive copyright licence.
As an aside, I feel that too many UK activists confuse anti-commercial
with anti-corporate: corporations often have enough money to abuse the
anti-commercial-licensed works if it helps them. Also, it's difficult
to write an anti-corporate licence, because corporations usually
employ other people to do their work. Using anti-commercial licences
for activism is usually scoring an own goal.
Quite.
CC wrote their NC license module explicitly to allow the emerging
dominant means
of making money off of "content" (p2p networks) despite the fact that US law
declares them to be commercial use!
Even before that, the King James V bible was controlled by letters
patent rather than copyright: anyone know more about that? When
I last looked into it, I didn't find much information.
The KJV is under perpetual copyright to the crown:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Bible#Copyright_status
This is a totally false and arbitrary distinction. I may use works
that represent someone's thoughts or works that cause a sensation to
get a job done, or works that I use to get a job done may be aesthetic
or entertaining in a way.
What's more, making this distinction is dangerous: it may allow people
to restrict the modifications to a functional work if they succeed in
presenting it as aesthetic, and so on.
Yes. Computer games are aethetic and functional, and to be honest so are Emacs
and Vi. Paintings serve many very useful functions, even before we consider
using them as ironing boards, and are also works of opinion. Michael Moore's
oeuvre (whether one likes him or not) combines function, information,
entertainment and opinion.
That dangerous approach means that I must now view FSF the same way
that RMS views CC. I can't recommend FSF in general at present,
because to do so is to support non-free-software works implicitly.
Pretty depressing state of affairs, IMO.
I don't believe that this is the case, as Stallman's views on culture do not
effect the efficacy of the GPL, and the SFDL has been drafted to make it less
un-free than the FDL.
- Rob.
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