I assume you have all followed the story about copyright trolls … people who buy up vaguely written old patents and then hold up new technology companies for violating them. See
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/transcript N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels Sent: Thursday, August 04, 2016 2:22 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] TPP pro and con Owen writes: “Oddly enough, this is somewhat like Open Source and its Licensing. What's to prevent someone from forking your repo and making it their own? (Happened with one of mine). But because the license was GPLv3, they weren't able to change the license and had to suffer some issues. It was clearly a rip-off, the Pull Request had > 80 commits!” People always think of copyright law protecting proprietary work, but it can do the same job for work intended for open distribution. The FSF (a small organization) has prosecuted companies for violating the terms of the GPL. As an economic development service, I would be happy to the government do or fund that, just as it would for protecting its own works. For people that have a software project and consider it central to their livelihood, it probably won’t be productive for others to fork it. The author(s) will out-work them and have the reputation in the community that the forking agent will not. Further as an author, one could pull from their branches to take whatever improvements they made. Turnabout is fair play. But if they take the work and turn it into a proprietary product without dealing you in, it is just copyright violation and breaking the law. Marcus
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