-- ** Alexandre Dulaunoy (adulau) **** http://www.foo.be/ **** 0x44E6CBCD **/ "To disable the Internet to save EMI and Disney is the moral **/ equivalent of burning down the library of Alexandria to ensure the **/ livelihood of monastic scribes." Jon Ippolito. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2005 14:18:17 +0100 From: Ian Clarke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Florian Mueller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: [asbl-libre] A clarification from EFF about Florian Muller's press release]
On 2 Sep 2005, at 13:48, Florian Mueller wrote: > Any allegation of a Council/Nazi likening is absurd because Actually, while we are painstakingly parsing English statements, I didn't say you had "likened" advocates of software patents to Nazis - a claim that would indeed be debatable and probably flat-out wrong, I said you had "compared" them to Nazis, something you clearly did in that quote. The problem is that it was counter-productive to raise the issue of Nazis at all in the context of the software patent debate. It allowed our opponents to characterise us as zealots with no sense of proportionality. > I'll also leave it to others to conclude whether a business > relationship in > 1995 through 1998, no matter how mutually beneficial it may have been, > constitutes any such thing as "commercial ties" in 2005. I think many people could legitimately question your wisdom in defending the actions of Blizzard in the context of the battle over software patents, without disclosing your commercial ties to them, irrespective of when those ties were established. > As for what Hartmut mentioned about interop for a game: Yes, I > think that > the interop case may be legitimate in other cases. However, the > key thing > here is this issue of piracy-enabling, and that an NGO that stands > behind > copyright should steer clear of even remotely supporting the act of > piracy-enabling. Ah, finally - we get back to the point. Anyone who supports a free and unmonitored Internet could be said to support the "act of piracy-enabling", since the Internet can and is an enabler for copyright infringement (I prefer to avoid the use of the pejorative term "piracy"). It is a simple reality that in many cases, intellectual property laws, including some aspects of copyright law, *are* a threat to a free information infrastructure, and thus it is entirely correct for the FFII to be critical of copyright laws where criticism is due. I believe it is you that has the inconsistent view, not those that oppose both software patents and some aspects of copyright law. I believe that the software patents issue is just one example of a wider problem with the expansion of intellectual property law well beyond what is in the interests of creativity,. This encompasses the anti-circumvention provisions in the DMCA, the EUCD here, and the issue of whether a shrink-wrapped software license should be considered a "freely negotiated" contract. I think it is far better to maintain a consistent front on the many relevant issues, than to focus on one and ignore the rest. Ian. _______________________________________________ bxl mailing list (un)subscribe via http://lists.ffii.org/mailman/listinfo/bxl and http://aktiv.ffii.org/. If you subscribed via the latter, you can unsubscribe only by going to both. _______________________________________________ asbl-libre mailing list asbl-libre@ael.be http://www.ael.be/mailman/listinfo/asbl-libre ASBL Association Electronique Libre http://www.ael.be/
