Stallman's not completely against copyright [LWN.net]

Stallman's not completely against copyright

Posted Dec 12, 2003 14:26 UTC (Fri) by emk (subscriber, #1128)
In reply to: Missed the movement... by Tashlan
Parent article: Bob Young writes a letter to Darl

As far as Mr. Stallman's views are concerned, I would argue that he (like most of us) isn't against copyright so much as he's opposed to a broken implementation of it.

Bingo. Stallman breaks creative works into three rough categories:

1) Functional works. These include software, manuals, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and so on. These works are basically tools, and users may want to update them.

2) Works of opinion. Stallman--who does a lot of expository writing--sees no need for people to be able to edit other people's opinions. This actually makes Stallman more pro-copyright than the Debian project, which is why Debian is criticizing him for the GFDL.

3) Artistic works. Stallman's ideas about derivatives of artistic works are more complicated.

Stallman has often considered 3-to-5-year copyrights in the past, and occasionally suggested they might be a reasonable compromise in certain cases. Recently, he's been leaning away from music copyrights because he sees no way to enforce them other than coercive police tactics and electronic surveillence, neither of which he sees as a good deal for society.

So Stallman's opinions are pretty radical in one sense, and pretty boring in another. He'd like substantial reform, but he's mostly going to write essays and release software under the GPL.

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Stallman's not completely against copyright

Posted Dec 12, 2003 15:55 UTC (Fri) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link]

Works of opinion. Stallman--who does a lot of expository writing--sees no need for people to be able to edit other people's opinions. This actually makes Stallman more pro-copyright than the Debian project, which is why Debian is criticizing him for the GFDL.

Wrong. We are not criticizing the GFDL because it forbids editing of opinions. The problem with the GFDL is that, through the use of "invariant sections", it promotes (or at least allows) linking of technical documentation with opinion sections (or even other technical docs) in a way that does not allow you to use any of the technical documention without including all of the opinion section(s). For example, you cannot use an example from the GNU gdb manual to document your GUI debugger without including the "Free Software" and "Free Software Needs Free Documentation" sections verbatim alongside it. There are also issues with the requirements for "transparent" vs. "opaque" distribution.

FWIW, I'm on the "Free Software" side of things, and agree with at least the general direction of Stallman's opinions and arguments. I still think the GFDL is a bad license, at least if the "invarian sections" part is used.