The implication of this is copyleft licenses (GPL, CC) are still legally
enforceable, meaning that they are not as "free" as something released
into the public domain.
On 03/03/2010 10:49 PM, [email protected] wrote:
Free with respect to purely informational matters means that you lay
no claim whatsoever to the physical property of others, including
their own speech or distribution of information, that requires
monetary compensation or cessation of operations. More concisely, it
means that you release the information with a promise that you will
not use violence or the threat thereof to collect proceeds from its
use. This means that all legal rights over the material are waived,
and that nobody else may claim these rights in the future (assuming
the complexity required to lay claim to an idea is not decreasing over
time, which, in reality, it is).
On 03/03/2010 01:41 PM, Rob Myers wrote:
On 03/03/10 04:08, George De Bruin wrote:
Let's not forget that free songs are often copyrighted, but that
Libre.fm will never be allowing nonfree materials for download.
Yes, but what is your definition of free?
http://freedomdefined.org/Definition
<http://freedomdefined.org/Definition> gets my vote as well.
What freedomdefined doesn't go into is *why* this definition is good.
It's obviously derived from the Free Software definition [1], but
culture ain't software. The reason it works for culture as well as
software is that both cultural works and software are texts, legally
speaking. And copyright law is used to try and restrict our use and
production of such texts [2], which affects our freedom of speech
[3]. We can use alternative licencing to protect our freedom of
speech as it applies to those texts and is challenged by copyright
and other legal measures.
[1] - http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
[2] - http://www.chillingeffects.org/
[3] - "Code is speech" - http://www.eff.org/victories/
- Rob.
