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From: Arne Vajhøj on 20 Jun 2010 22:26
On 31-05-2010 06:52, ClassCastException wrote:
> On Sun, 30 May 2010 19:59:36 -0700, Roedy Green wrote:
>> [copyright] is required or it would be almost impossible to make money
>> writing books or programs. Custom programs would survive, but no one-
>> size-fits-all.
>
> That is the popular misconception, yes, but there's mounting evidence
> that it simply isn't true.
>
> For one thing, authors made money long before there was copyright.
> There's only been copyright for about 300 years, but people have been
> writing (and being paid to write) for thousands.

Back when copying meant writing the same by hand, then the cost
of copying created a natural barrier.

> Lots of software development, including "one-size-fits-all", occurs under
> the aegis of very liberal licenses like BSD and Apache. This development
> includes a fair bit that's for-profit and not one dime of their revenue
> came from copyright enforcement. Still more such development is non-
> profit in character. The Linux kernel itself was written as a hobby, for
> example. Copyright was not needed to incentivize this.

But a lot of the people working on these projects are working for
companies that makes a huge part and in some cases the majority
of their money on software licenses.

> The question about copyright now, realistically, is not whether it is
> *needed* or *nothing* will get created, but what amount will maximize
> creation and access to the results. It's becoming clear that that amount
> is much lower than what we currently have -- perhaps two or so years with
> broad fair-use exemptions, enough for books, movies, and new software
> versions to make the bulk of the money they will ever make -- and quite
> possibly zero.

It is not particular clear.

This is just statements without any facts.

Arne
From: Arne Vajhøj on 20 Jun 2010 22:30
On 31-05-2010 06:37, ClassCastException wrote:
> On Sat, 29 May 2010 21:47:50 -0400, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>
>> On 29-05-2010 03:56, ClassCastException wrote:
>>> This might have something to do with the fact that Aquafina makes quite
>>> a bit of money bottling and selling stuff that pretty much all of their
>>> potential customers can get out of a faucet for free.
>>
>> Not a good comparison.
>
> Of course it is. It's the *classic* example of successfully competing
> with free!
>
>>> It might also have something to do with the fact that the entertainment
>>> industry is not, contrary to popular belief, losing revenues to piracy.
>>> Declining sales of things like DVDs and recorded music have a complex
>>> web of causes, in which the effects of online piracy are not reliably
>>> different from zero according to the statistical studies.
>>
>> That "fact" is very disputed.
>
> By idiots. The studies' results are what they are, even if many refuse to
> accept them.
>
> Anyone who clings to a theory despite a growing weight of contrary
> evidence has ceased to practice science and has become a pseudoscientific
> quack at best and a religious nut at worst.

Bullshit.

All the serious economic science expect there to be some effect
but consider it very difficult to estimate it.

For a summary of where science stands read:

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d10423.pdf

>>> The moral of the story: the GPL absolutely is NOT incompatible with
>>> profiting from selling software, NOT EVEN if you restrict your business
>>> model to selling copies.
>>
>> Companies making monet on GPL usually do it by selling support
>
> Correction: usually have at least *one* revenue stream be selling
> support. It need *not* be the *only* one.

No. But it is by far the largest for most of the wellknown open
source companies.

>> The GPL license does not prohibit it, but the terms of GPL plus basic
>> economics do that you need something other than selling copies to
>> prosper.
>
> If that were true, then Aquafina would have to sell more than just
> bottled water to prosper.

You can probably sell GPL software for the same price as a bottle
of bottled water.

But that will not make the software industry prosper.

Arne
From: Arne Vajhøj on 20 Jun 2010 22:40
On 31-05-2010 12:42, Bent C Dalager wrote:
> On 2010-05-31, David Lamb<dalamb(a)cs.queensu.ca> wrote:
>> On 31/05/2010 5:55 AM, Bent C Dalager wrote:
>>> I do not see that there is any way for an author to put his work into
>>> the public domain. He might write "this work is in the public domain"
>>> on the front page of course but it is not clear that this holds any
>>> legal weight at all and indeed my own country says you still keep
>>> certain inalienable copyright privileges over it.
>>
>> What country is that?
>
> Norway. The English (non-authoritative) version of the law is here:
> http://www.regjeringen.no/upload/KKD/Medier/Acts%20and%20regulations/Aandsverkloven_engelsk_versjon_nov2008.pdf
>
> in particular para 3:
> (...)
>
> "The author may not waive his rights under the first and second
> paragraphs, unless the use of the work in question is limited in
> nature and extent."
>
> "(...) This right may not be waived by the author."
>
>
> also para 38c:
> (...)
>
> "The right under the first paragraph can be neither waived not
> transferred. (...)"
>
>
> and para 39e:
> (...)
>
> "Any agreement that to the detriment of the author significantly
> deviates from the provisions of the second, sixth and seventh
> paragraph cannot be applied. The author may not waive his right
> pursuant to the fifth paragraph."
>
> (...)
>
>
> There may be other examples, these are the ones I could easily find by
> searching on "waive" in the document. Not all of the above may apply
> to software, I didn't check. Some specifics of software are treated in
> paras 39g,h,i.

FireFox and Thunderbird uses SQLite.

The authors of SQLite has released it as public domain.

If such a release is not valid in Norway, then all users
of FF and TB in Norway are breaking copyright.

I think a lot of IT people would be willing to testify about
"industry practice", "common sense", "the intention of the law"
etc. if that came to a trial.

Arne
From: Arne Vajhøj on 20 Jun 2010 22:36
On 31-05-2010 05:55, Bent C Dalager wrote:
> On 2010-05-31, Arne Vajh�j<arne(a)vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>> On 30-05-2010 08:45, Bent C Dalager wrote:
>>> On 2010-05-30, Arne Vajhøj<arne(a)vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>>>> Since open source requires copyright then no copyright means
>>>> no open source.
>>>
>>> If open source "requires" copyright then it is only because in the
>>> current legal regime copyright is mandatory.
>>
>> Copyright is not mandatory.
>>
>> It is perfectly legal to put code in public domain.
>
> How do you propose to do this? The Berne Convention clearly says that
> all works that can be covered by copyright are covered by default. The
> only mention of the public domain in the convention is in saying that
> expired works enter into the public domain. There is no provision for
> explicitly entering a work into the public domain before its expiry
> date.
>
> Furthermore, my own national laws stipulate that a subset of the
> privileges offered by copyright are inalienable, that is you could not
> sign them away even if every fibre of your being trembled with desire
> to do so: The law won't let you.
>
> I do not see that there is any way for an author to put his work into
> the public domain. He might write "this work is in the public domain"
> on the front page of course but it is not clear that this holds any
> legal weight at all and indeed my own country says you still keep
> certain inalienable copyright privileges over it.
>
> The only apparent way to mitigate the impact of copyright over one's
> own work is to write very generous license terms for it. As you point
> out, this means that your work is still protected under copyright
> however generous you are. This is as it must be under the current
> legal regime.

There are slightly different rules for copyright around the world,
but the fact is that public domain software is almost universal
de facto recognized.

>> Open source chose not to do so.
>>
>> Because they want to have some license conditions.
>
> I believe it is rather that they realize they /must/ write a license
> because the law effectively requires it of them and then they tend to
> tag on a pet provision or two after the "use as you wish" bit of the
> open source license.

They could have chose public domain.

Some code writer do choose that.

Some choose an open source license.

>> No copyright => no license conditions => no open source.
>
> Why is it that software which has the most generous license term
> possible under the law (that is, no conditions), cannot be "open
> source"? Surely if it were /possible/ to release source code into the
> public domain then this would be just as open as an open source
> license is?

Because the open source license gives some rights.

>>> It does help, of course, that copyright is such a huge and
>>> indiscriminate sledgehammer you can use it to kill just about
>>> /anything/, including copyright. Open source will tend to use the best
>>> tool for the job even if that tool is copyright.
>>
>> Open source does not kill copyright. They just use copyright for
>> a different purpose than MS, IBM, Oracle etc. (or should I say for
>> those companies close source offerings - they do have open source
>> offerings as well).
>
> Open source developers certainly have a varied set of motivations for
> their chose of license; some would prefer to have their license
> destroy copyright while others believe copyright is essential for them
> to earn a living.
>
>>> Neither patents nor copyright are needed for software development to
>>> thrive so it seems to me your conclusion is based on false premises.
>>
>> Neither traditional closed source nor open source would be possible
>> without copyright.
>
> But of course they would: closed source would be protected as a trade
> secret, which is effectively what is happening already anyway, and any
> source that anyone actually distributed would be open source by
> default.

Would it be a material change to protect closed source by
trade secret instead of copyright?

>> I am not aware of any company making a living from public domain
>> software.
>>
>> Based on that I am very skeptical about software industry in a world
>> with no copyright.
>
> While the estimates vary, around 80% of the software industry consists
> of various in-house projects: Customer tracking, inventory management,
> project reporting, niche expert systems, etc. This 80% of the industry
> would benefit greatly from the absence of copyright since they don't
> need it anyway: their software is only applicable to, distributed
> within, and used by their own organisation. The absence of copyright
> would make their job much easier - and less expensive - by not forcing
> them to reinvent the same wheel that hundreds of others have already
> designed to death time and time again before them.

The problem is that even though a lot of software is only used
inhouse, then most companies do not want to reject the possibility
to at some later point in time sell the software to external
customers.

Otherwise corporations would rarely have a problem with GPL!

Arne
From: Arne Vajhøj on 20 Jun 2010 22:55
On 31-05-2010 06:46, ClassCastException wrote:
> On Sat, 29 May 2010 22:10:56 -0400, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 29-05-2010 04:17, ClassCastException wrote:
>>> On Fri, 28 May 2010 20:31:14 -0400, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>>> If everybody could copy software exactly as they wanted then I am
>>>> pretty sure that the software industry would be in a very poor shape.
>>>
>>> I actually doubt this; I think it would work rather differently from
>>> now in some ways, but that people would have found a way to make it
>>> work and to profit in it. Plenty of businesses profit from open source
>>> software in various ways, including by selling support or simply by
>>> funding development of open source software that they use in-house and
>>> get productivity gains from, and, by funding it, get more influence to
>>> have features they'd find useful added and the bugs that particularly
>>> harm their productivity prioritized.
>>
>> Since open source requires copyright then no copyright means no open
>> source.
>>
>> So the existence of open source does not prove that copyright is not
>> necessary.
>
> I don't think so. Open source with the BSD or Apache license has so
> little restriction on distribution that if all software code was public
> domain, the BSD license and Apache license using development/business
> models would pretty much be unaffected.

They seem to think otherwise, because they chose their licenses
over public domain.

> If copyright disappeared tomorrow, the whole software industry would
> eventually reorganize along the lines of such projects.

Unlikely.

Apache is getting a lot of money from IBM.

IBM making less money => less resources to Apache, Eclipse etc..

>>>> Sounds like blogs from teenagers that wants to be able to download
>>>> everything for free and have parents to pay the bills.
>>>
>>> I have my doubts whether Against Monopoly (run by a pair of degreed
>>> economists) and Techdirt (run by a successful dot-com entrepreneur) are
>>> "from teenagers that want to be able to download everything for free
>>> and have parents to pay the bills". :)
>>
>> Given that you do not provide links or names or anything, then the
>> teenager guess is as good as any.

> Now, since you seem to need some real hand-holding here, I'll post the
> links:
>
> http://www.againstmonopoly.org/
> http://www.techdirt.com/

The top story right now is a speech by a biochemist and
something about T-shirts respectively.

Not exactly convincing as the place for serious Economic
science.

>> There may be many different ways to use copyright.
>>
>> But copyright works identical for all - open source or closed source.
>>
>> In fact open source are some of the fiercest enforcer of copyright,
>> because:
>> * they need it even more when they hand out source code
>> * a large fraction of open source people do not believe in
>> patents, so they only have copyright
>
> Most open source licenses do not actually enforce anything crucial to the
> business model, so to the ability to profit from the software
> development. Arguably even the GPL doesn't, but particularly most of the
> non-"copyleft" ones just ask for attribution and maybe one or two other
> minor things. Trademark law and laws against misrepresentation and fraud
> could probably be used to cover such needs, and they can probably be done
> without.

Apparently they believe otherwise, because they chose their
licenses.

Arne
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