[cc-community] Critique a short essay on Free music?

Terry Hancock hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Thu Nov 8 01:18:50 EST 2007


drew Roberts wrote:
> Right. I too feel this way, although I have seen an argument made that we are 
> wrong here. IIRC I think it went something like this:
> 
> With no copyright, no monopoly profits and no ability to lock up binariesand 
> no ability to command monopoly pricing.
> 
> Hold back the code? All ti takes is one rewrite and all have it.

Except this "one rewrite" is not so easy. Ask the ReactOS folks.
Seriously, we have only "one rewrite" until all software is free
software, but that doesn't change the fact that reverse engineering is
hard when you don't have source code.

Without copyright, the only way to protect your monopoly is to hide
behind TPM technologies or binary-only distribution. And yes, that can
be cracked or reverse engineered -- but either is a lot of (wasted) effort.

And of course, there are still a lot of works for which I personally
think the traditional copyright + sell rights approach is the best. The
problem is more that fair use is too restricted and copyright terms are
too long. If copyright only lasted 20 years (like patents do today) and
most non-commercial uses were allowed, then copyright would not be so
oppressive, and yet people could still make a living through traditional
publishing methods.

It's good to have choices about these things -- abolishing copyright
could be just as oppressive as having a too strong copyright is.

Cheers,
Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com



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