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cc-licenses - Re: public domain question (private forks and copleft)

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  • From: "Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>
  • To: cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: public domain question (private forks and copleft)
  • Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 08:40:40 -0500 (EST)

That the original author can license his work under copyleft
and keep an all-rights-reserved version to himself is only allowed
because COPYLEFT CANNOT PREVENT IT. My guess is that if copyleft
COULD prevent anything from slipping outside the community property
lines, it would. However, dual licensing exists OUTSIDE what copyleft
can control. Dual licensing is a function of copyRIGHT not copyLEFT.

That individuals can fork proprietary versions of their own code
is NOT because of the generosity of Copyleft. It is because copyleft
cannot prevent it. You would have to have something like "certification".
Certification is used by OSI to make sure people include their source code
in their packages. Because it would be possible to license your binary
under copyleft and withold the source code. And OSI certification is
meant to prevent someone from keeping their source code to themselves.

You would need someone like OSI to certify that the original author
does not have any private forks of his own code, because copyleft
by itself cannot prevent it.

It isn't that copyleft ALLOWS authors to keep private forks.
It's that copyleft can NOT PREVENT authors from keeping private forks
of their own code because private forking is a feature of COPYRIGHT.

So, everyone can just stop presenting that example as some sort of
"proof" that copyleft guarantees rights to individuals.
Copyleft doesn't give the original author that right.
It is part of Copyright and outside the control of copyleft licensing.

Copyleft isn't about guaranteeing rights to the indidivual
for the individual's benefit. Freedom of speech is a right
guaranteed to the individual and the community cannot stifle
Free Speech no matter how much they might want to do so.
Free Speech is guaranteed to an individual even if everyone else
in the whole community does not want to hear it.

Copyleft is about granting SOME rights, but only up to the point
that those rights BENEFITS the community. Individuals may take
someone elses copyleft code, create a derived work, and distribute
it, but ONLY if they also distribute the source code.

Putting that into the first ammendment would be saying
congress may not abridge the freedom of speech
unless that speech is dissenting against the politicians in power.

No, it isn't the same as yelling "FIRE" in a theater,
because you just went from simple speech
(someone says something and someone may or may not listen)
to physical harm of indivuals in that theater.

Freedom of Speech was meant to protect the individual so
they could say anything in dissent against the state.

Copyleft IS the state. and it allows people to say anything
up to the point that it remains state property. There are
things that people COULD say that would remain in the realm
of speech that copyleft does NOT allow. There are things
people could say without getting to the level of yelling
"fire" in a theater or inciting a riot, that copyleft does
not allow because it would harm the copyleft community.

That isn't an inalienable right of an individual.
That is putting the benefit of the state before the indivuals.

Copyleft isn't about "freedom" or "rights"
it is about building a COMMUNITY







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