2016-02-11 8:05 GMT-08:00 Joshua Gay <[email protected]>: > Out of curiousity, for those that do strongly believe all works should > be freely licensed, do you believe that GNU GPL, is therefore itself a > work that is an injustice to those who recieve it and that it should be > condemned and avoided?
As an intellectual monopoly rights abolitionist, I acknowledge that there are many positive steps along the way. The GPL and similar tools are a huge accomplishment and their non-modifiability is a negligible issue compared with the wonderful achievements they have made possible. Indeed in a world that has IMRs, restricting modification of licenses is at least a plausible instrument against license proliferation, which is a real risk as we have seen in past decades. ND seems a particularly poor choice for the FSF's website, however. It creates legal impediments for collective action and essentially reduces the entire FSF's website to "the opinion of an individual". Even the translations that are present are not permitted under the ND license, so the right to create such translations is only implicitly granted, not explicitly. A wiki like LibrePlanet (which uses the FDL, itself a poor choice for a wiki because of its cumbersome requirements) would obviously not be possible under ND. Using ND for a website may create long term risks as the original copyright holder(s) become unavailable to provide permissions needed for changes, necessitating wholesale replacement of texts where partial adaptation might have done the job. As for the protection of opinions, one could exempt key documents of opinion from a license change if absolutely necessary. I personally don't believe that this is a good protection against people misusing or misquoting your words. First, the risks seem mostly abstract. Have there been any recorded instances of a licensing claim being brought under the ND license against someone improperly using opinions presented on the FSF website? Do we have any evidence of a deterrent effect these terms have had on actions which needed to be prevented? Do we have, in contrast, evidence of opinions that have been shared under freely licensed terms being misrepresented in ways that their authors felt powerless against? Second, there are many other social and political tools beyond copyright law which can be brought to bear against people who act immorally by deliberately misquoting or misrepresenting one's views. Indeed, most of us would choose to use such tools well before resorting to the blunt instrument of a copyright claim. The most common misuse scenarios I've seen were of photographs, music or videos being used in conjunction with, or to promote, activities by individuals the licensor considered reprehensible (e.g., using music as campaign songs), often in ways an ND license would not in fact have prevented. In most of those cases I'm aware of, the licensor did not in fact bring legal action, but simply spoke out against the use, embarrassing the individual or company. The voice of the undisputed author of a work carries great weight, regardless of the license they chose for their work. Warmly, Erik
