On 2004-09-23 02:43:24 +0100 Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org> wrote:
And again, I don't believe "the freedom to prosecute with patent accusations" is an important "freedom" to protect, any more than "freedom to take my software proprietary". I think it's valid and legitimate for a free license to restrict this "freedom".
I don't believe that the freedom to bear arms in urban areas is an important freedom to protect, but it's not one that copyright law has much to do with. My use of copyright law should leave it unchanged. This is preservation of independent things. It's not protection, just as it's not persecution.
That is more-or-less the line I'm arguing we take with patent law too. I don't think it's right that it can apply to software anywhere, but deliberately muddling copyrights and patents any more seems a basic wrong move.
As you noted, there are implementation problems too. This seems likely, as I have been told many times by experts and real lawyers that patent law and copyright law are very different. Because I trust their words, I'm suspicious of people who try to combine them. It makes me uncomfortable: I've years of dealing with copyright, but much less experience with patents, as they hardly touch me.
Finally, there seems little need to combine them, so what's the incentive driving authors who do?
People taking your work, enhancing it, and distributing binaries without source, is not a copyright-based problem at all, but it's still dealt withvia copyright.
It seems like a copyright-based problem to me, because that would be the law People would be using to restrict the work in your situation. In the absence of a copyright permission for it, can it be done legally?
-- MJR/slef My Opinion Only and not of any group I know Creative copyleft computing - http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ LinuxExpo.org.uk village 6+7 Oct http://www.affs.org.uk