If you won't be bound by your own license, why should we take you seriously?

Posted Jan 31, 2021 21:57 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: If you won't be bound by your own license, why should we take you seriously? by bkuhn
Parent article: Elastic promises "open"—delivers proprietary

> As such, my priority, as a copyleft theorist is to figure out why copyleft is not working to defend software freedom and what we need to do to fix it

I think that's pretty obvious. Certainly in America, it's difficult to enforce. Copyright theft is just accepted as a fact of life.

One only has to look at Reuters - they nicked a newspaper article (where the author had basically licenced it "Creative Commons just attribute me") and when the author complained, they just said "if you kick up a fuss we'll make sure you never publish another article again!"

What you want is the European attitude - copyright theft for gain is a criminal offence in Britain (even if it's not really enforced), and given that Europe tends to emphasise preventing future breaches it shouldn't be too hard - given evidence of previous breaches - to get an injunction requiring importers to certify IN ADVANCE that their gear doesn't breach copyright.

That would pretty much kill the habit of importing something illegal and discontinuing it before you get called on it ...

Cheers,
Wol