Anti-software-patent lobby should pay attention

Posted Dec 1, 2004 23:00 UTC (Wed) by danielthaler (guest, #24764)
In reply to: Anti-software-patent lobby should pay attention by dwalters
Parent article: Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

... okay, I know the FSF doesn't even think copyright should apply to software in an ideal world,...

That sounds wrong. I'd say the FSF feels all code should be free (as in open/accessible/modifiable). Copyright (or rather copyleft) is a means to achieve this. If they felt there should be no copright there would be no GPL.

GPL vs. No copyright protection

Posted Dec 2, 2004 1:11 UTC (Thu) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link]

The differences are subtle.

The GPL uses copyright law to make the right to redistribute the software
conditional: the software must be redistributed with the same GPL
license, the software distribution must not be encumbered by any other
agreement that might effectively prevent any of the GPL rights from being
exercised, and the software must include all source code required to
exercise all GPL rights.

Removing all copyright protection from all software would effectively put
all software under terms similar to a BSD license. This would grant
everyone the right to copy, use, modify and redistribute all software,
unless they had a separate agreement (e.g. a contract) which prohibited
such activity.

The GPL makes redistribution rights conditional on certain behavior on the
part of the people doing the redistribution. Removing all copyright
protection would grant the redistribution rights to everyone without
imposing the obligations of the GPL on anyone. This would mean that
people would be free to make binary-only proprietary Linux distributions
and distribute them only to people who sign an agreement to keep the code
absolutely secret...something the FSF probably doesn't want.