Re: Questions about legal theory behind (L)GPL
On Thursday 20 January 2005 17:38, Raul Miller wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 20, 2005 at 02:17:11AM -0800, Michael K. Edwards wrote:
> > Agreed. But use of a brand name to attempt to stop other people from
> > giving away the same thing you do under the same name is a bit of a
> > novelty.
>
> Advertisers have been doing this for years, as have broadcasters.
>
Hi
I just signed up to this list today, a discussion somewhere else about Debian
and trademarks led me here.
It's nice to see some FSF doubters (I have just been reading this thread in
the archives) and questioning of their speech based copyright vision. I think
I agree with Micahel that precedent is fairly against the FSF and Lessig
views of the proper interpretation of copyright.
Its also nice to see some people talking about how TMs and other things might
restrict the "freeness" of open source. There has been too much junk said by
people that it purely a licence issue and everything else including US Export
Regulations dont interfere with the freedom of the licence!
Anyway, has anyone here ever thought obout the way open source is produced and
organsied in terms of trusts or fiduciary obligations?
I was in a series of Aboriginal art acses in Australia. the last one the court
found that "the traditional owners of the corpus of ritual knowledge" from
which an artwork was derived painter and sold by an artist from their group
had an equitable right to restrain 3rd parties.
I have done a bit of thinking trying to think of another way of looking at
open source other than straight copyright/contract law and it seems to have
similarities with this Aboriginal situation - their is a community of
knowledge producers who produce in common the stuff of their life, they are
all able subject to certain internal protocols to distribute, sell, produce
and reproduce, but equity restrains them or any third party (even with only
implied notice) from using the knowledge in a manner inconsistent with their
tradition and internal protocols. A system of trust operates within the
community of producers and users which is sufficently well known to bind
third parties not to use the material in a manner inconsistent with the
communities principles.
I am not sure if that is food for thought or not. I can go on, but maybe thats
enough to say hello.
martin
--
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"the riddle which man must solve, he can only solve in being,
in being what he is and not something else...."
http://auskadi.tk
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