Gabriel Sechan wrote:
From: "Michael O'Keefe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
If we didn't have copyright to allow the author to control how people
use their work, then in our business (F/OSS), the M$'s of the world
(and their not the ONLY ones) would sit back, take the best ideas,
copy them verbatim into their own work, without even giving due
credit, and sell it (which, in of itself isn't a crime) without
letting others learn from them, just like they learned from you.
And we could then just take their program and copy it as much as we
wanted, leaving them with no real benefits from doing so, but a lot of
problems (keeping the code in sync with bug fixes in disparate
architectures is not easy). Not optimal, but I could live with this.
Althpough I would not be opposed to laws saying you must give proper
attribution.
I'd much rather have them reigned in than allow a free for all.
As I've said, most F/OSS developers have a "day-job" that they can
fall back to to afford to give their "art" away. But the majority of
artists have to sell it, and need a marketplace in which to sell into.
Which there wouldn't be without copyright protections stopping 1
person buying it, and then wholesale copying and selling take place.
It worked for hundreds of years without copyrights. I don't see it
suddenly failing now.
I'm not against very short term copyrights to provide a short term
profit motive, but the key is just that- short term. If you haven't
made a profit in 3-5 years, you aren't ever going to. And a short term
would provide incentive for them to keep producing, rather than allowing
them to live off past works.
In a free for all world, there prolly would be any big coprporations to
take the ideas from the little people, coz there'd be no financial
benefit to it, with every man and his dog giving away copies on every
street corner. But with big corps talking the talk and walking the walk
in the corridors of power, we're not likely to see this free-for-all
utopia anytime soon....
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