Using Copyright WAS: Re: [PD-dev] Political Impropriety

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Jan 3, 2006, at 9:07 AM, c wrote:

>> What's the advantage of using unclear laws instead of clear free  
>> licenses
>> such as MITX11 and SIBSD ?
>
> theyre good if you are into obfuscation and ambiguities and want to
> weed out those in your userbase who care about a clear license. there
> are those who just dont care (me being one, i know yves would rather
> spend his time and money making tea for hugo chavez and not waste it
> on silly lawyers...)

You bring up a good point here about lawyers.  Most lawyers pretend  
that the law is free (as in beer) when talking about things like  
copyright license terms.  The talk about all sorts of clauses to  
licenses as if they were easy to enforce, and that justice will just  
automatically reign upon us. (Sadly, I think Lawrence Lessig is a  
victim of this line of thinking with his Creative Commons licenses).

But the reality is that the law is really expensive.  So if you have an  
attribution clause in your license and a large corporation uses your  
software without attributing you, are you going to spend US$10,000 to  
sue them to force them to?  All you'd get it attribution, and it'd  
actually cost you US$10,000.  That's how much it costs to sue large  
corporations, it can often cost a lot more. Why do you think that all  
the people sued by the RIAA for downloading settled out of court?   
Their settlements were cheaper than fighting to clear their names in  
court, even if they were totally innocent, as some of them were.  And  
that's exactly what RIAA is counting on when they sue people.

Another example of a similar situation is a clause like "Not for  
military or repressive use."  By legal standards, it is vague. What is  
the legal definition of "repressive use"?  Is that the same definition  
that the author intended?  A vague statement is even more expensive to  
defend in court.  So now, let's say a military organization uses the  
software.  In order to stop them, you have to take them to court, which  
will cost a lot of money.

But if that same software had been released under the GNU GPL, then  
even though that military would be allowed to use the software, they  
would have to release any of their additions under the GNU GPL.  In the  
vast majority of GPL violation cases, a letter from a lawyer is enough  
to get the sources released since it is well established in courts and  
has the clout and lawyers of the Free Software Foundation behind it.   
Then instead of spending precious money on court fees fighting the  
military org, it could be spent on much more productive things, and  
also, that military org would be contributing to the development of the  
software that you use to fight them.

So the choice really seems to be between an idealistic expression and  
an actual benefit.  Even though I believe in such idealistic  
expression, I think that copyright license are not the place for it  
because its counter productive to the ideals expressed.

.hc




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