Finally clarified

Posted Aug 26, 2005 15:17 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
In reply to: Final clarification from my end on this one here by FlorianMueller
Parent article: Letter to Editor: Response to Florian Mueller's Release re: "Anti-IP"

Your position is quite clear now. Even as your arguments kept growing heads like a hydra, they had the paradoxical effect of letting us see through all of it. Basically, it is to side with the stronger side, without regard for reason or fairness; a deep and complex instance of argumentum ad crumenam, i.e. letting money decide. Your whole message could also be applied to a hypothetical "Adobe vs KPDF", "Macromedia vs GNUFlash" or even "Microsoft vs Samba"; the distinctions you drew earlier (game or office setting) are of no substance now.

In this context, the EFF was obviously doing the right thing: defending the weak party against the powerful one. Just like when Dimitri Sklyarov was jailed for (legally in his home country) removing Adobe's PDF protection; or when Jon Johanssen was judged for (legally in his country too) letting people watch DVDs on their computers. Huge amounts of money and far-fetching business models were threatened, far more than in this case; it is a worthy activity to defend those people.

And, by the way, "sloppy" incorporation of code is not the only way to violate copyrights inadvertently; it was mentioned as an example. You chose to leave out the issue of kernel modules, which Moglen himself (primary enforcer of the GPL for 20 years) apparently cannot unravel on his own; and there is also fair use, about which the US copyright office says:

The distinction between fair use and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined.

If you have never copied code from a book or a web page you are safe. And then, there are also those sudden changes of heart where a court forbids what was previously clearly allowed, as seen in the bnetd case.