I confirm: sharing is good no matter what.
If the law prohibits sharing, then the law is bad. It must be changed. To do
so, the people must sometimes do the right thing and disobey the wrong law.
Would you say the Montgomery Bus Boycott should not have happened?
To some extent, I do the same with my publications. Almost all editors make
scientists sign documents stating that the editor becomes the sole copyright
holder of what the scientists wrote (otherwise the article is not published).
This is wrong. Those articles should be free to redistribute. Especially when
written by public servants like me. Otherwise the people pays twice: for the
salary of the scientists and to access their results.
That is why I disobey those copyright forms and let anybody download my
articles from my website. Many scientists do that. This is good. Thanks to
that, the editors do not sue anyone! At some point, they rethink their
outdated business models. Several of them start proposing "open access
journals". However, most of the time, they demand far too much money
(universities do not have enough) to have the article published in such a
journal. Eventually, we hope to have laws that will state that scientific
publications (or, better: anything!) must be freely sharable in a
noncommercial way. It is going well. In France for instance, there is HAL.
Would that be the case if all scientists would respect the copyright forms
they sign? I strongly doubt.
The software I develop is, of course, under a free software license (the GNU
GPLv3).
