Re: GFDL

[Fedor Zuev <Fedor_zuev@mail.ru>]

On Sat, 3 Oct 2003, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:

>Fedor Zuev <fedor@earth.crust.irk.ru> writes:

>> 	The same (see above) point is not correct for political
>> speech.  Unlimitedly modifiable political speech is _not_ a normal
>> mode of operation and never was.

>Political speech has been around for about two thousand, six hundred
>years, at least, in substantial written form.  Going as far back as,
>say, Demosthenes.

>Throughout the first two thousand, three hundred years of that time,
>it was unlimitedly modifiable.  The notion of copyright is a late
>development.  Even then, however, it was not applied to political
>advocacy, which continued to be distributed without copyright for a
>very long time.  Such things as, for example, the Lincoln-Douglass
>debates or Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" were not copyrighted.

>Copyright on political advocacy only became regular around perhaps
>1900.

>So let's make the following table:

>                   Computer Programs               Political Writing

>Started                 1950                            600 BC
>Copyright legally clear 1976                        AD 1700
>Copyright not uncommon  1980                        AD 1900
>Today                   2003                        AD 2003

>So you are right that copyright came about late in the game, and was
>not the normal thing for computer programs.  But guess what!  It came
>about even later for political writing.  That is, for the fifty-three
>years (roughly) of software, copyright has been legally clear for
>twenty-seven (about half), and frequent for twenty-three.


	You completely right about, specifically,  copyright.

	But copyright is not the [only] thing I said about. I said
not about copyright, but about normal mode of operation, which is
orthogonal to the copyright itself.

	Plagiarism and|or corruption of social, political and,
especially religious texts was unanimously considered harmful and
was punishable a millennia before invention of the first copyright
law[*]. This was solely in the interest of public, without any
care about author's revenue.

	The same is not the case for the computer programs. Reuse of
any possible piece of code, modification of programs according the
immediate needs was always considered normal and honourable
activity.

	Modern copyright law tends to undermine all other legal,
social and ethical matters regarding a creation of original works of
authorship.  Because of this, if we want to state something about
original works, we forced to formulate this in the language of
copyright. But this is not mean that every matter besides copyright
is _really_ void.



[*] For example, large part of russian history back in 1600s-1700s
was driven around [supposedly] incorrect translation of Bible
(Nikonian break-up). For the similar reason catholic tradition
forbids tranlation of Bible at all, as well as Muslim tradition
regarding Koran.