> From: MJ Ray > What's more, making this distinction is dangerous: it may allow people > to restrict the modifications to a functional work if they succeed in > presenting it as aesthetic, and so on. > > That dangerous approach means that I must now view FSF the same way > that RMS views CC. I can't recommend FSF in general at present, > because to do so is to support non-free-software works implicitly. > Pretty depressing state of affairs, IMO.
Indeed. A very disturbing development. It is almost as if it constitutes territorial manouvering prior to the arrival of a mechanism that requires such artistic apartheid. This mechanism is either the Grand Unified License representing the wedding between FSF & CC, or it is an art tax. If an art tax, it could presage the blanket valuations that would be necessary. Software, recipes, designs and other useful/functional works of art, are priced highly. Aesthetic and entertaining works of art, are mid-priced. Literary/journalistic, mundane works of art are priced low. Divide and conquer? How can you tax music and not software? You can't tax an MP3 single at $1 and a copy of of MS Word at $1. So, create a distinction. Functional art is taxed at X, entertaining art is taxed at Y, mundane art is taxed at Z. Categorisation and category appraisal are notions that belong in centrally planned economies. They are not useful to free market economies in which the value of a work of art is determined entirely by its market - the audience that appreciates it. A possibly related issue is the idea that software should be distinguished from other art in that it has source code. This is spurious. Software IS source code. That it may be composed and manipulated in a variety of formats different to one or more forms in which it is realised, used or enjoyed is a natural dualism that applies to many other forms of art, especially digital art. At the end of the day art is the expression of human thought. Whether that expression is recorded in physical form (however ephemeral), and to whatever extent the physical form may be performed or interacted with, are continuous aspects of the art's nature, not its value (to society or anyone). And this then makes one wonder if somehow this categorisation aims to drive a wedge between functional art versus entertainment, e.g. abdicate from whether copyright is ethically wholesome as applied to entertainment, in order to focus wholly on copyright (and patents) being inappropriate for software. Almost a US based demonstration in support of the utopia as enjoyed by Europe where artists 'justly' enjoy the use of copyright on their art, but software engineers remain free to liberate their art from copyright via the GPL, and are specifically exempt from patents. How to recreate this state of affairs in the US? Say that functional art requires exemption from patents? It all seems to me as if this is a deal between FSF and CC. CC says "We'll partner with you if you support the artist's entitlement to wield copyright", and FSF says "We'll only do that if you embrace the 4 freedoms for software amd support our campaign to exempt software from patents". CC then says "Hmmm. If you can create categories that clearly distinguish software from other art, we should be able to keep all CC/GPL licenses consistent and become one big happy family". Thus I think it's probably more likely that CC and FSF are courting each other, than that this art categorisation is to prepare for taxation CC wants to create a CC-S/W license and needs to categorise software so that this software license doesn't interfere with licenses for other categories of art, e.g. CC-SA. They also want it compatible with GPLv3, so they're consulting FSF. FSF would probably rather CC have one s/w licence that was GPLv3 compatible, than see it create a fricking family of mutually incompatible software licenses with a pick'n'mix variety of freedoms restored. This marriage of convenience would be quite a hodge podge. Maybe such hodge podges are inevitable pragmatic churn prior to the ethical purity of abolition? ;-) And, yes, there could be a Grand Unified License that nullified copyright, DMCA, and patents for ALL art (however some people might like to categorise it). _______________________________________________ fc-uk-discuss mailing list fc-uk-discuss@lists.okfn.org http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/fc-uk-discuss
