Don't expect any patches from the students in Bolzano

Posted Feb 4, 2006 3:40 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: Don't expect any patches from the students in Bolzano by evgeny
Parent article: Linux in Italian schools - five months later

This is totally about copyrights. If not for copyrights, there would be nothing to stop you from borrowing or lending the CD to install on another computer. The license involved is a copyright license -- i.e. a person who has the right under copyright law to stop you from making a copy of the software chooses to allow you to do so. If there were no copyright, there would be no license.

A license is not something one can violate. When people say "he violated the license," it's a shorthand for "he violated the conditions of the license, therefore didn't have a license, therefore under copyright law was obligated not to make a copy."

If the CD is ordinary proprietary software, then the kid has no license, conditional or otherwise to make the copy on the second computer; there's nothing to violate except copyright.

Copyright law creates a quite unintuitive right to control who gets to make copies of stuff you wrote. The copying public subjects itself to such laws because in the big picture, it may cause more stuff to get written. That's what's not intuitive to a 9-year-old.

If he got caught at doing so, the punishment would be similar to that for a theft. It's in this context (software copying vs. theft) that I made the "unintuitive == morally wrong" statement.

I don't quite follow, but if you're saying it's morally wrong to equate such a copying action with a conventional theft, then I agree. The law doesn't do so, by the way -- except in the most abstract sense where every legal right is a property right. It's just copyright owner publicity that tries to draw the analogy between copying and stealing a bicycle, to persuade people not to copy.

Don't expect any patches from the students in Bolzano

Posted Feb 4, 2006 10:34 UTC (Sat) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link]

> If there were no copyright, there would be no license.

This is true, but compare e.g. the MS EULA.txt with the couple of standard copyright protection lines found in any book.

> I don't quite follow, but if you're saying it's morally wrong to equate such a copying action with a conventional theft, then I agree. The law doesn't do so, by the way -- except in the most abstract sense where every legal right is a property right.

IANAL, of course, but the general perception in public is certainly like software piracy == theft. Just google for "stolen sotware" and "illegally copied software" and compare the hit counts. Also, the notion is widely spread in all kinds of homebrew "explanations" of software fair use, e.g. see http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/ethics.html ("... illegally copied software is viewed as stolen property"). I had to sign a very similar form myself in the past.