Copyright abolition (was Re: [fc-uk-discuss] DT Articles on recording copyright extension)

[MJ Ray]

Tom Chance <tom at acrewoods.net>
> - Moral rights, especially the most basic - attribution - that is guaranteed 
> by most (all?) free licenses. It can be central to careers and, in 
> continental law in particular, it's deemed central to respecting personhood. 
> How would you deal with attribution without copyright?

Aren't moral rights and copyright pretty much distinct? For example,
I believe you can assign your copyright, but not your moral rights,
but maybe I'm mistaken.  Is it possible to abolish one without the
other? I think so and it then becomes mere questions about what are
moral rights and how long they last (N years? lifetime? lifetime+N?).

> - The GPL's stipulation to provide source code, which couldn't be guaranteed 
> without copyright (someone could just share a binary), and which isn't 
> covered at all by most (all?) free culture licenses.

Without copyright, reverse engineering might be more widely
practised and could be more generally useful. It would be
trading one sort of freedom for another. Which would be more
useful? I don't know.

Crosbie Fitch point b from a few emails back needs slight
modification: no author has a right to payment for *past*
work. If you do the work without a clear idea of how you'll make
money from it (being paid for the work, or as an advertisment of
what you can do so that you get paid for future work, or even as
donationware or ransomware), that's your business problem. Don't
expect the state to support intellectual capitalism forever. It's
already holding our cultural development back.

I think reciprocality (such as attribute works if you want to
be attributed) is a moral topic and not necessarily non-free.
Many religions include the "Golden Rule" in their ethical
instructions.

By the way, Creative Commons might be free culture's most
important tool (or it would be if more of their licences were
free culture ones), but it's also both free culture's biggest
opportunity and biggest threat. I don't put much faith in
RMS's opinion of it because the Free *Software* Foundation's
non-free-software "Free Documentation License" is far worse
than anything CC have made: it's an adware-book licence! Even
if the original author doesn't activate the adware clauses,
any later modifier can. http://mjr.towers.org.uk/blog/2006/fdl

Hope that helps,
-- 
MJ Ray - personal email, see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Work: http://www.ttllp.co.uk/  irc.oftc.net/slef  Jabber/SIP ask