Wired news has an article about copyright and copyleft. A legal seminar in dublin discussed this topic last week. Some people even encouraged people not to purchase any commercial product that wasn't created under GPL because such products fail to feed back into the wider community.
Free software for all!
Software that is placed under "copyleft" -- as opposed to copyright -- may be in a legal limbo and is still reliant on the concept of copyright, an Irish legal expert says.
But during a legal seminar Tuesday in Dublin on "Copyleft and Open Source Software: History, Applications and Legal Issues," Free Software Foundation founder and principle GNU developer Richard Stallman argued that the concept of copyright is inappropriate to the digital age and restricts freedom and innovation.
Copyright today is a system inflicted on the public, not a system that benefits the public," Stallman said.
Stallman encouraged programmers to keep software in the public domain by using copyleft and the General Public License, which allows users to run, modify, copy, and distribute software as long as the program's source code remains publicly available.
Stallman said the GPL and copyleft helps guarantee that "freedom, principle and ethics" are part of the software developer and user community. "We have to think of the social consequences of our work," he said.
However, Paul Lambert, a lawyer with LK Shields Solicitors in Dublin, argued that even with copyleft "as a fundamental concept, copyright remains, because copyleft can't work without copyright."
If a creative work was of sufficient quality and uniqueness, "copyright manifests automatically," he said. "It's created by statute -- you can't get away from that."
Therefore, copyleft is not "the end of copyright as we know it," as some critics have argued, he said. Software developers can thus not disclaim copyright, but may either license or assign the work to others.
Read the full article here.
Source: Wired News
