Licence text and fabs

Licence text and fabs

Posted Oct 5, 2006 10:51 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: Licence text and fabs by mingo
Parent article: Busy busy busybox

> How would that happen in practice?

Very easily.

Mr V. goes to his local MP to make DRM mandatory and protected by law on all media processing boxes. The MP asks if it will hurt someone. Mr V says "of course not, it will only catch evil pirates".

Mr F can then come saying "But this will ban use of FLOSSTV, which is licensed under the GPLvx which is uncompatible with the proposal" competition and free market is good, you can't do that. This is a strong argument.

Right now M F can only say "But this will harm FLOSSTV, which is licensed under the GPLvx which intent/spirit is uncompatible with the proposal" competition and free market is good, you can't do that. This is a weak argument, spirit and intent count for zip.

In case you think I'm making all this up, I'm only repeating from memory some of the arguments used in the French Parliament when the EUCD directive was translated in local law this year.

Some of the articles proposed by the majors were clearly uncompatible with existing Free Software license terms and could be amended. For others the uncompatibility was not so clear cut and unfortunately opposing them proved impossible.

The harm BTW was not only FLOSS-side. The law hurt numerous actors, but they all found out nothing but the most blatant problems (such as law/license uncompatibilities) had any weight against the majors' money.

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