> I am not sure if I understand fully Mr Maturana's point fully here, but I > infer that he is saying that people are resorting to patents because > copyrights are so ineffective.
Exactly. Note that the analysis above is not mine. I read it signed by some intellectual in some Spanish paper when the last IP reform was adopted in Europa. I remember this analysis as very "transparent". > While there are differences between copyrights and patents, > the purpose of > both is protection of your IP. And again, if the law is > impotent in its > enforceability and evidentiary standards, there is a very > serious problem > with the status quo. . I think the better Law is a law which asserts the equality of parts. That is, a contract. All laws are a contract. A License also can be a contract (common sense tell us that most of actual software licenses are false contracts, that is, an imposition of arbitrary conditions) Laws are not arbitrary, or they are not laws. Even the Constitution is a Common Contract. I believe that the best IP protection will be guarantee when authors will recognize the equality of rights of "derivators". My opinion is that some of the OS licenses are not fully compliant with this idea, but they grow up anyway because they are based on the mutual confidence between author and licensees. Al least, OS licenses proves that confidence is a stronger basis than coercion. ==== While thinking about your comments, I got some analogy. Consider one minute that IP Laws reproduce a feudal scheme. This analogy is surprisingly fertile :-D) For example, we can say that a work is a fief. The copy-owner is a lord, or landowner. The licensees are the serfs who produce goods by derivation. And the fees are the Intellectual Taxation that the serfs pay for receiving regular versions! Ok, this is only an analogy, but it helps to understand a lot of points. - First, there is no real difference between an OS license and a non-OS license. When examining the OS scheme, we see that the only difference with non-OS scheme, is that the landowner has released the serfs from any obligation. But the OS Landowner has preserved the same property scheme than for non-OS landowners. The property scheme does not change at all. The serfs can live without taxation as long as they do not try to cross through the fief boundaries. When they compare their status with other serfs in other neighbors, the serfs easily retain some affection for their landowner. However, this kind of affection is still a chain. The serfs understood they are only released. In fact, the landowner only gave them freedom but not the Liberty. This is because Liberty is given by Laws while an arbitrary license given by a simple copy-owner is not a Law. - Second, this analogy helps us to find solutions to the OS issue. The goal is not exactly to cut the author's neck (we shall need him alive, see later). The solution is to proclaim that inside the boundaries of the Author's fief, "We", author and licensees, we are equals in rights. Doing that, we proclaim the same thing that IP Laws (under Berna) proclaims: IP rights of authors and "derivators" are the same on their respective versions. Authors are needed because their moral rights are the legitimate source of the licensees rights. The author's original copyright is needed to enforce the rights of licensees under the Laws. Therefore, what we need is that authors replace their arbitrary system of "rights granted", by a definite number of "obligations _freely_ contracted". In other words, we want a true "contract" where all parts will be equal in rights. In other words, we need some model of Open-Contract, which works like a constitution for people, but applied to "derivators". - Third, this analogy shows that the actual licensing model lives in the past history. It shows that Laws and International Treaties can protect the OS model better than any non-OS protected model. === IMHO, the analogy also shows how this OS initiative can play a good role for software: it can work on defining the rules which will ensure that a license is conformant with this Open Contract. Note that under a contract model, this is no matter if the authors do or do not request a fee. They will do as they wish. The matter is to ensure that author's license enforces the equality of the rights of licensees for copy, modification, adaptation AND _translation_ of his work. For example, one contract can say that the commercial ownership of the work will be suspended (the PLT/LPT). Another can say that licensees will share with him distribution rights (I saw some OS models close to this). The point here is that under an Open-Contract model, the licensees will be given "free obligations" rather than undefined "rights". That is, obligations freely adopted, for example, by voting === Ok. I finish. This thread started on the idea that OSD had some issues. As a translator (and an author of a translation license for which I requested your approval :) I suggest the following: I believe that the OS software model should be ensure the conformity with Berna. As long as this model is fully WIPO/Berna compliant, it is applicable under the laws of all the countries under Berna. This way there is no need to inform people that the licenses are not translatable. This kind of warning only prove that the license itself is deficient. Of course, the license must be translatable! :-) Well, a good way to go with this is maybe to redefine the "software" as a "translatable" work and protect it under the PLT/LPT license! :-) Ok - this almost a joke. Anyway, this kind of solution would grant to thousands of users/translators of free software around the world the same consideration and rights than for authors. Therefore, citizens in their own countries could promote OS and tell to their governments which is the model they want: an open model, and some another about which nobody knows _nothing_ (In fact, i wonder if some good lawyer could demonstrate that the proprietary licenses are illegal under Berna, precisely because they do not allow people to translate and/or disassemble these products!) The goal is to reverse the progressive assimilation of software with Industrial IP. Instead the correct way should be to define a protection scheme fully compliant with Berna, and to write in front of your translatable work (aka "software"), something like this: UNAUTHORIZED RESTRICTION TO ACCESS, DISASSEMBLY, TRANSLATION OR DISTRIBUTION OF THIS SOFTWARE, OR ANY PART OF IT, WILL RESULT IN SEVERE PENALTIES, AND WILL BE SUBJECT TO PROSECUTION TO MAXIMUM EXTENT POSSIBLE UNDER LAW.(*) That is, you win. (*) Note that I translate copyright notices like this once a week (without the word "restriction"). There is no need to be certified. Of course, the translated notices have the same authority than original, in all languages, in all countries, under all Laws. Regards [I.R.Maturana -- Trad En>[ES<>FR] - http://www.in3activa.org ] (Even if they do not agree with my views, I hope that members did appreciate my dominical analogy... :) -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3