Over the top

Posted Jun 2, 2009 4:53 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510)
In reply to: Over the top by jake
Parent article: Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Sure, Jon's example was non-infringing because it was his own work and deliberately engineered to turn on the notice he wanted to display. But it's silly to claim that's the common use.

Sure, we want concessions from rights holders, so that Free Software / Open Source can participate in tomorrow's media. They want something too. There are concessions that we can't make to them, because that would make the software not Free any longer. "My way or the highway" isn't going to be a valid strategy because we're not running the show - we hardly even have a seat at the meeting. So, let's not throw away the few concessions that we can make.

Over the top

Posted Jun 2, 2009 5:04 UTC (Tue) by jake (editor, #205) [Link] (1 responses)

> Sure, Jon's example was non-infringing because it was his own work and
> deliberately engineered to turn on the notice he wanted to display.

What I meant, and obviously didn't make clear, was that Jon quoted from that ALI PDF file in his article. *That* was, imo, fair use. And would have been 'prevented' by the copy bit.

In another comment you said:

> if we want to have some role for Open Source in society's future other
> than supporting locked-down systems, respect other folks rights as we
> would have them respect ours.

But I haven't seen anyone arguing otherwise. They just need to respect our rights (or defenses) as well. And, by and large, they don't.

jake

Over the top

Posted Jun 2, 2009 5:25 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

Nothing was preventing Jon from typing in a few lines.

The problem is that we haven't done anything to convince the media producers, or legislators, that we have any rights worth protecting. Because we are not, in general, representative of their customers, who are perfectly happy with what they have.