Re: GPL v3 Draft

[Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu>]

Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 16, 2006 at 02:15:09PM -0500, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> > > No covered work constitutes part of an effective technological protection
> > > measure: that is to say, distribution of a covered work as part of a system
> > > to generate or access certain data constitutes general permission at least
> > > for development, distribution and use, under this License, of other
> > > software capable of accessing the same data.
> > It sounds like this means "if your GPL application accesses data, you grant
> > a GPL license to every other application that accesses the data".
> 
> Not quite -- it says "you give general permission for other applications
> to be distributed under the GPL". Which means that when someone does
> reverse engineer your stuff, and puts it in a GPLed app, you can't then
> say "You don't have permission to do that because you're violationg <my
> patents|the DMCA>" -- because you've already given them the permission
> you claim they don't have.

I am not disagreeing with you here, but my main issue with this
paragraph in the license is that it can just not be true.  GPG is an
effective way of encrypting communications, and having the license say
otherwise does not change that.

<snip>
> On Mon, Jan 16, 2006 at 11:02:09PM +0100, Bas Zoetekouw wrote:
> > IMO, this is a clear violation of DFSG 6.  If we allow terrorists to use
> > our code, and allow it to be used in biological weapons research,
> > clearly also black hat hackers must be allowed to use it to produce
> > spyware.
> 
> I don't think it's right to demand that authors give explicit permission
> to do illegal things; and I don't think we should start treating a lack
> of permission and explicitly not giving permission as different.
> 
> I read that clause as banning distribution of (a certain class of)
> contraband, which is banned already anyway -- probably even to create or
> possess, let alone distribute. As such, I'm not actually sure it covers
> anything in practice. If that's not correct, and it is banning things that
> aren't already illegal, there might be a problem.

This is just a rehashing of the chinese dissident test.  I don't think
it is reasonable to enforce bad laws on people with copyright
licenses.

Cheers,
Walter Landry