"Without copyright law the GPL would be unenforceable. It would also be unnecessary"
FSF supporters tend to be predominantly libertarian gun-nuts in my experience, not marxists. I'm not saying there aren't people who self-identify as marxists or communists who support the FSF, it's cross-spectrum, however: Something pretty akin to Marx's labour theory of value is commonly used to "justify" copyright law - the idea that something is in some way "worth" the amount of work it took to create rather than what it might fetch on the free market is essentially marxist. Copyright and patent laws' oft-stated primary motivations are basically socialistic: "help the starving artists / authors / programmers", "encourage science and the useful arts" etc. - deliberately granting long monopolies to certain people to allow them to AVOID free-market competition. Because 'obviously', if there were a free market in such things, nothing would ever get produced. Riiight. (that was sarcasm). Some propagandists use the term "intellectual property", but that doesn't make copyright (or patent) law a particularly defensible or necessary part of a "capitalist" system. Such monopolies even act to undermine and devalue physical property rights. See also "Against Intellectual Property" by Stephen Kinsella. http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
