- The Free Software Definition (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html)
- The Right to Read(http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html)
- Misinterpreting Copyright A Series of Errors (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html)
- Did You Say Intellectual Property? A Seductive Mirage (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html)
- Confusing Words that are Worth Ignoring (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html)
- What is Copyleft? (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/)
- Copyleft : Pragmatic Idealism (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html)
- Software Patents - GNU Project (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/)
- Bruce Perens : Analyzing Microsoft's TomTom Lawsuit (http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/12068_3807801_1/Bruce-Perens-Analyzing-Microsofts-Tomtom-Lawsuit.htm)
- Microsoft's Patent War Against Linux : TomTom Settles, Linux Loses (http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6718/1/)
- The freedom to run any program, for any purpose
- The freedom to study how a program works, and change it to make it do what you wish. Access to the source code being a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour.
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing so you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code being a precondition for this.
you should be able to exercise these rights, without having to ask or pay the author for such
rights, or even communicate with the author. You should be able to use the free work for whatever purpose. It also mentions solutions that take advantage of free software should not impose further restrictions or limits in its own way, be it software, hardware or otherwise (such was the case with TiVo's use of the GNU/Linux). The merging of other free code and modules should also be allowed by free software licenses. Furthermore, the freedoms given are irrevocable (so long as the user did nothing wrong), and permanent, and cannot be retroactively changed! An important distinction about a free license is that it does not impose copyleft, that is it is possible to make a nontrivial amount of changes and not need to share the source. Commercialized applications can be licensed under a free license so long as end users have the rights afforded by the four principles of free software. It also states that these licenses should not contain clauses that implement government imposed export controls. Contracts or license agreements cannot override the rights afforded by the free copyright.
The Free Software Definition then discusses the process or creating and implementing a free license. It begins by asking those interested to look at existing free licenses because there is a good chance that there exists a free software license that meets your needs. However, it mentions that if for some reason you could not find a free license to base your software on, to contact the Free Software Foundation to discuss a possible license strategy that adheres not only to the wording of the free software definition but also the spirit of it.
It then argues that this free software definition can not only be applied to software, but also to complementary items such as software manuals. In addition, this same argument can be applied to other valuable works, such as Wikipedia, and infact any cultural work can be free, by applying this methodology to it.
Finally, it mentions that open source is not the same as free software, in that while the source code may be available, you may be limited in what you can do with the source code.
The right to read is a fictional story created by Richard M. Stallman, which tells the story of two college students : Dan and Lissa, who lived in a world where the rights to read and share books were heavily limited by DRM like technologies that limited and monitored access to such material. Infact things that we take for granted today such as libraries no longer existed, and one had to take loans out just to afford to read, as you had to pay for everything you read!
The story discusses other restrictive burdens put on society, such as the limited and careful monitoring and distribution of debuggers, as they could be used to circumvent monitoring and licensing mechanisms, even though they could also be used for legitimate purposes (such as finding bugs in software). In addition, free operating systems and kernels were outright banned and made illegal. In addition each computer had a root password which only Microsoft and the FBI knew about, which would allow you to change operating systems and gain full control over your computer system.
Dan faces a moral dilemma that this new restrictive world brings, his friend Lissa, wants to borrow his computer to complete a midterm that was assigned to her, as her computer broke down. However, while he can (and eventually does) lend Lissa his computer, he is worried that she may read books that are on his computer, for which only he is licensed to read. You see Lissa came from a middle-class family and could barely afford tuition let alone the books she needs to help her do well in her studies. If Lisa were to read his books, he may face prison time and academic repercussions. In the end, he takes the risk and lends Lissa his computer and fortunately he did not get in trouble for helping her out.
What I found scary about this entire article was the author's note which was written some decade after the article was published and documented how the scary future told in the story is now becoming a reality. Laws such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), European Union directives, international treaties and other legislation around the world is making it possible for authors to limit how content is being consumed.
A perfect example is today's e-book, a book which can be read through an electronic device (such as a computer). While in the physical world we can freely share a books that we own, current digital rights management techniques, which are protected by these laws prevent E-books from being shared as liberally, often times with the books locked down to one device, with the author being to control the content, such as removing or changing that content on our device. In the future publishers may stick strictly to this new format and the risk that society faces is a world where literature cannot be freely accessed, as copyright in the physical world afforded us. In fact many newspapers have stopped physically printing their newspapers and are rapidly switching to this digital restrictive format. Of course this issue is not only limited to books, but also other works such as audio, video and other mediums for which society used to take the freedoms afforded to us by copyright for granted.
It also goes on to discuss the trusted computing platform implemented in operating system such as Windows Vista which could in theory provide the root passwords and root access discussed in the story. As mentioned before, the downside to this is that we could be entering a future of computing where our rights and control over the computer and what we can do with it are severely limited. In addition, organizations such as the FBI could in theory gain access to our systems either pyhsically or remotely in ways which we would never dream possible in the past (even with encryption).
The article misinterpreting copyright - a series of errors, discusses some of the fallacies in the current copyrighyt debate.
He begins the article by looking at the United States Constituiton, the document in the United States which formed the blueprint for current copyright law. He then cites article 1, section 8 of the constitution which states:
"[Congress shall have the power] to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
There are several implications of this part of the consitution. Firstly, that legilsation can be passed with the goal of promoting progress of science and the useful arts. Secondly, that such protections such be secured for limited times, hence you cannot hold this right indefinately (something we will get back to shortly). Thirdly, that such legislation is not required, but is permitted.
The copyright system and its laws, he argues are not designed solely to benefit publishers and authors of creative work, but rather to provide an incentive to these individuals to develop more creative work. Therefore, this type of law was designed to be a bargain, where congress would spend some of your freedom in the hopes that it may allow for a more creative society. He stresses that more and more it is becoming the publisher, not the author who is receiving and aggresively using these affordances in copyright. This means that copyright, laws that were designed to allow for a creative environment for authors, is being used more and more by publisher who offer no creativity to society!
Now that we know the intent and design of copyright, he then discusses what he feels is the first mistake that is currently being made in the copyright debate, which is that copyright laws must strike a balance between publishers and readers (a.k.a society). He argues that this way of thinking elevates publishers to the same stature as readers. However, it is wrong to think that way because the laws were designed to benefit readers, and encourage publishers to develop creative works. In fact as RMS notes, what we are really doing with copyright law is finding the right trade off between publisher protections and society's freedoms!
Maximizing the amount of published work regardless of how it affects our freedoms and liberties is the second error in the copyright debate according to RMS. It may be alright with trading away minor amounts of freedom to encourage the creative process through copyright. However , this battle of toughening copyrights is doing more harm than good, as it is stripping even more important freedom away, just to gain a marginal amount of additional innovation. At some point society must realize that it is not worth maximizing creative output if it means giving up our freedoms!
Maximizing the publisher's output by these tightening laws (see error #2), in combination with other legal tools such as shrink-wrap licensing, has the effect of strangling basic rights and freedoms given to society that come with published work that we take for granted. For instance, the publisher's goal of effectively removing the "right of first sale," and "fair use," rights via licenses and possibly legislation is being pressed at every level of government. Ironically, this has the effect of limiting creativity in society, as the removal of these basic rights and freedoms means that derivative works that are based on prior art may someday in the future not be allowed, or be tightly regulated. This goes again the founding principle of copyright in the US constitution which is to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts," in other words creativity by authors. A world where Walt Disney could not create many of his popular stories based on the work of prior stories, or where Shakespeare could not use the works of other playwrights to develop his plays.
The results of these three errors, RMS argues, is that we are now having legislation where copyright owners are given broader powers, for an even greater amount of time (possibly indefinately). The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) was cited as an an example of legislation which broadens the copyright powers given to publisher, which was legislation passed to comply with an international treaty (the WIPO-CT). Publishers can now use any number of forms of digital rights management (DRM) to limit how people can use and share copyrighted work in ways that traditional works could never be protected, and circumventing such technologies is illegal! Furthermore Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act is an example of copyright being extended the benfit of copyright for upto 90 years! One must ask themself, we've given up all of these rights that we have had before, but what have we as a society received in return for these laws? It would seem that the harm far outweighs the costs of both legislations. Troubling still, publishers are asking for even more restrictions, that even more freedom be given up in the form of legislation that mandates to manufacturers to build DRM into their technologies!
Finally, in this article, RMS writes his prescription for what he feels is a right bargain for copyright law. He begins by arguing that if copyright is a bargain that is being made on behalf of the public by our elected representatives, then any legislation must put the public interest in front of the publisher's interest. Our representatives should only give up as little of our freedoms as they must, and demand as much as dearly possible from the publishers in return. He goes and argues that copyright legislation should be pruned back significantly as the current laws mean we are giving up too much of our freedom and getting very little in return. He argues that copyright laws can be pruned back in phases, with the public observing what (if anything) happens to creativity in society. If there is truly no affect on the creative arts, it is likely that we can further prune back copyright law in another again through another stage. In addition society should restrict licenses and other contractual arrangements that limit the effective power of copyright. While the publishers may threaten that such pruning will limit creativity, their threats are empty as they will continue to keep innovating in the free and productive marketplace.
There are several dimensions of copyright law, which RMS feels can be pruned down. The first dimension, which he calls the duration dimension, is how long copyright protection should be granted for. He argues that copyright protections should end several years after a work has been published, and that this duration would depend on the nature of the work being copyrighted. For instance, he argues for 10 years with published work (as most of the revenue for a book is generated in the first couple of years). Another important dimension that he mentioned in his essay was fair use. He argues that fair use should allow for small scale noncommercial copying amongst individuals.
The article, Did You Say "Intellectual Property"?It's a Seductive Message, is an article written by Richard M. Stallman which argues that the whole notion of intellectual property is at best a mirage. Intellectual property, as it is now defined are basically works protected either by patents, trademarks or copyrights. Each of these government imposed monopolies has their own meanings and implications and have evolved in separate ways, which RMS argues cannot simply be strung together into one term.
He argues that this terminology came about from the founding of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in 1967. Furthermore the term has been used ever since to imply that these legal tools (patents,copyrights,and trademarks), are a sort of physical property that needs the strict affordances provided by laws governing physical property. Not surprisingly legislators have been changing these laws more and more to reflect the implication of the term intellectual property, as more and more IP holders, and the lawyers representing them continue to refer to this term.
The meanings of each legal tool lumped into the term Intellectual Property, was then explained by RMS in the article. Copyright law, he argues, was designed to promote authorship and art, and covers the details of expression of a work. On the other hand patent law was intended to promote the publication of useful ideas,at the price of giving the one who publishes the work a temporary monopoly over it. Finally, trademark law, he argues, was simply designed to enable buyers to know what they are buying. He then concludes that it is important to keep these legal entities separate in ones mind, as each one has its own implications and solves very different sets of issues. Thinking about these laws as one clumped together terminology has the effect of us thinking about the commonalities of these laws while ignoring the subtilties found in each of these laws, such as the rights afforded to society, not the IP holders. He concludes by stating that if we think of trademarks, patents and copyrights separately and fully, we will have a better understanding not only of the law, but the spirit to why these laws were created.
One thing that bothered me about the article was that he thought that economics is focused solely on matters of production while matters of freedom and way of life are issues which are not of importance to economics. Unfortunately this is one area of thinking where I think that RMS is severely mistaken, as economics isn't solely interested in matters of production and maximizing value. This would be equivalent to me saying that free software is only concerned about making software cost nothing, and that it doesn't care about matters such as the freedom to view and modify source code! Infact economics concepts such as externalities are concepts in economics which realize the importance of society and the greater good.
Confusing Words that Are Worth ignoring are buzzwords and jargon used in the computing industry, which RMS feels should not be used. Rather than summarized each definition proposed, I will lump RMS' terminology complaints into categories of frustruation.
The first set of frusturation with terminology used by the computing industry is the usage of words that refer to proprietary solutions to refer to some general action or word. He mentions, Powerpoint, MP3 Player, and Photoshop as being prime examples as they are used in our vocabulary to discuss generalized things (presenting a presentation, music player, and photo editing) yet refer to proprietary solutions.
Another category of terminology that frustruates RMS are terms that confuse the true meaning of the term free (as in freedom) software, or which further confuse the public's view of software licensing. These terms include BSD-style, closed,open, for free, freely available, freeware, and give away software. Most of these terms refer to free in price, but not free in freedom, and do not follow the four principles of the free software definition.
Then there are terms which RMS' feels are doublespeak or whitewashes the issues that these terms pose. These terms include reasonable and nondiscriminatory (RAND) to refer to patent encumbered standards, trusted computing which refers to technologies that effectively limit access to people's machines, or consumers to refer to people who consume digital goods which cannot in effect be consumed (such as information or music), or PC to simply refer to computers running Windows, instead of its original intent of referring to a computer that an individual uses (regardless of OS).
There are terms which don't correctly refer to GNU/Linux as simply Linux, such as LAMP (the Linux Apache Mysql, PHP stack) System, or Linux system.
Words that have no particular meaning and are just hype also annoy the author, such as cloud computing.
There are also terminology used by lawyers or to make legal arguments against free software and piracy, and they include: compensation, content, creator, digital goods, digital rights management, intellectual property,piracy, protection,sell software,software industry, and theft.
Terms that inadaquetly describe the open source world and they include: hacker,vendor,market.
Finally he mentions a term that abdicates the need for ethics: ecosystem as we typically observe an ecosystem but rarely consider the ethical implications of how entities in the ecosystem regard ethics.
What is copyleft is an article which discusses the principles behind copyleft, and methodologies (such as licensing) that enforce this philosophy. A related article, Copyleft : Prgamatic Idealism, which this section of my blog post also discusses, deals with the practical issues surrounding copyleft.
One may think that free projects such as the GNU can meet the requirements of the free software definition by simply placing their work in the public domain. However, one major downside that the article mentions is that derivative work can take advantage of the fruits of the GNU project's labour, while not donating the derivative work back to the community. In a sense public domain work encourages a take but not give back to the community mentality to those who base their work on such projects. The GNU project needed a legal mechanism which forced those who based their work on the GNU project to give their derivative work back to the GNU project, and the way they get away with this is by imposing copyleft on the software instead of simply placing it in the public domain.
Copyleft essentially uses copyright law for the reverse purpose of what most people use copyright law. Instead of protecting the rights of authors by limiting distribution and copying, copyleft forces those who are bound by the copyright (such as those creating derivative work based on the copylefted software), to copyright and license their software with exactly the same license/copyright as the copylefted software. In that way authors are required to redistribute the source code of their derivative work which is based on copylefted software.
Finally the article goes on to how copyleft is applied in the software world. Essentially a copyright is applied to software which is to be copylefted. Distribution terms are then added which in effect apply the philosophy of copyleft to a legal instrument which copyright enforces on all people who use the software in any way. These distribution terms are typically implemented in a license of some sort, such as the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Software patents are another issue of concern not only for the free software community, but for everyone in the software industry. As the Software Patents article written by Richard Stallman points out, even unknowingly implementing an idea covered by a patent is considered patent infringement (although you have implemented it independently of the patent, as was the case with the compress program and the LZW patent). Contrast this to copyright, where if you create similar but independent work of an author, that is not considered copyright infringement. One could rightly argue that it would be extremely tedious and time consuming, if not impossible for a developer to look through all the patents currently granted before developing a solution to a problem. Since a developer comes up with many different solutions to several problems to create a fully functioning computer program, the chance for software patent infringement is very high, even if they had not read the patent before. Patents also have the effect of limiting creativity on the part of developers as it creates legal gray areas where innovation cannot be effectively practiced.
There are three ways that people can deal with patents, and include:
- Avoiding the patent
- Licensing the patent
- Overturning the patent in court
Avoiding implementing features of capabilities altogether can prove to be a difficult and unpopular approach to dealing with patents. Firstly, this may mean that certain features of your software simply cannot be implemented because important parts of its implementation are covered by patents. As a result, your software may become less and less useful as you realize that more and more of your features are covered somehow by a patent. In addition, some of these patents may cover functionality that is essential for the proper functioning of software (for instance British Telecom's patent covered in the article). Secondly, there are algorithms that have been patented which limits what types of algorithms can be implemented in your software. These algorithms could for instance be a faster way to get a job done, or it may just be an the only effective way of solving a problem (for instance public key cryptography). While these effects may effect some software developers minimally, as it only represents a minor improvement or enhancement to their software, for others these patents could strike a critical blow to the usefulness of the software.
Licensing the patent is not always an option, as patent holders always have the right to refuse you a license to the patent. This has the effect for many of shutting down entire software operations whose business hinges on innovations that somehow "touched," someone else's patent for whom they cannot acquire a license. Even if you can license a patent, often times the patent holders will demand a royalty from revenue (usually a percentage of revenue). This has the effect of eating away the revenue and viability of a software business to cover a patent license which your software may only slightly unknowingly infringe upon. Some large companies, like IBM have built up such a large patent portfolio that there is a good chance that there is a patent which causes you to infringe on their patent rights regardless of what you do. In addition, some companies may only license their patents with you if you in turn license your patents to them (called cross-licensing), which companies use to extort innovations out of inventers.
The final way to deal with patents is to overturn them in court. The criteria that a potential patent must satisfy before becoming a patent is that it is novel, useful and unobvious. While these criteria seem clear and straightforward in disproving a patent claim in court, the reality of actually trying to defeat a software patent is the difficult and frustruating at best. First and foremost to fight a patent in court costs the plaintiff (the person arguing that the patent is invalid), perhaps millions of dollars, well out of the reach of many individuals and companies to afford. Secondly, fighting the criteria that was used to grant a patent is very difficult to show in court. For instance, if you want to disprove that a solution is not novel, you must show prior art that closely resembles what is being patented, and not only that you must prove that this prior art was created and developed before the patent was applied for.
Patents are a cancer, argues RMS, however this cancer affects different industires in different ways, and the validity of the patent system in one industry may not make sense in another. He makes the argument that patents may make sense for the pharmaceutical industry, as it covers a very narrow innovation, for which there is significant investment in development and production. The patent system was designed to help innovators recouperate such investments in return for making public this otherwise proprietary knowledge. However, software deals with abstract mathematical constructs which in and of itself can cover a wide variety of different applications. In addition, the cost for innovation in the software field is typically significantly less than that of the pharmaceutical industry as there is less investment that needs to be made in the technology and infrastructure to support it. Therefore, the argument for patents in the software industry seems to make little sense.
Seeing as the three techniques to deal with patents have proven themselves to be ineffective at best, one must now ask the question, how do you fight the software patent system? One method is to fight where patents are currently being applied for, and issued, which is to say the patent office. This first technique has worked well in Europe where European laws have effectively stopped the practice of applying patents to software. However, this does not apply so well in the US and the UK, where precedent for software patents has been established for a long time. In which case one may want to fight the patent system using the second method, which is to say when patents are being granted. He argues that in such cases the scope of such software patents should be severely limited as much as possible. This limitation begins by having patents state what they area of industry they cover. In this way an automobile patent should not for instance infringe on word processing software, should there be such a patent that crosses that boundaries.
The two articles written by Bruce Perens document the legal battle between the software maker Microsoft, and the GPS maker TomTom, surrounding TomTom's use of the Microsoft FAT filesystem, a technology protected by patents, as well as several patents related to their line of business.
These patents, Bruce argues, are patents which disclose obvious and trivial implementations to workaround technology limits (especially so with the FAT patents, such as handling long file names). Beyond the obviuos factor which he claims, he also states that much of the technology patented has plenty of prior art associated with it that implements nearly the exact same thing (for instance computers in cars existed before Microsoft filed its patent for it). Therefore, one has to question the validity of these software patents, which is the basis for Microsoft suing TomTom.
Beyond patents, another frusturating aspect to the argument is that most solid state media (that is usb flash drives, and memory cards) are preformatted to the FAT filesystem. It is because of Microsoft's market dominance that Apple and other manufacturers were forced to support FAT in their systems to originally support FAT formatted floppies. As a result an entire software and media market gravitated to this proprietary file system which Microsoft had not enforced with patents before. As a result of this, device makers such as TomTom who made use of removable flash devices had to build in support for FAT as most flash devices came preformmated with FAT. It was only then when Microsoft selectively decided to enforce it patents on TomTom and indirectly sue the Linux community as a whole.
Speaking of patent enforcement and infringement the article then discusses how prohibitively expensive it is to defend oneself in software patent litigation. It mentions that TomTom disclosed that it was spending around $5,000,000 per patent infringement case to defend itself. Therefore the legal system encourages settling patent infringement cases (which TomTom did with the Microsoft FAT patents)even if you know you have not commited any wrongdoing due to how expensive it has become to defend yourself in such litigation, especially if your opponent has more resources (i.e. money) than you do. Furthermore the mere settling of such patent infringement cases implies that your organization and those affiliated with your case (i.e. Linux in the case of TomTom), have admitted to committing patent infringement and thus legal precedent has been established.
An important thing to think about is that if you were to commit a crime in most countires, you are afforded a lawyer by the state for free. Therefore this begs the question, should those named in a patent infringment case be given the right to free legal defence by the state, or alternatively by those suing them?
The effect of the Microsoft/TomTom settlement therefore, is to create an environment of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) in the free and open source world. This has the effect of scaring users away from the open source model and platform, for fear of possibly being held liable for taking part in patent infringement. What is even more troublesome is that many free and open source developers will look at the TomTom case and be scared away from developing free and open source applications as it may in some way violate some other proprietary software maker's patents.
The articles conclude that the only solution around this patent issue is to outright ban the practice of software patents. It may be enjoyable in the short-term to invalidate other people's software patents on the basis that there is substantial prior art that proves that the patents are not inventing anything truly novel. However, this only invalidates a minor number of software patents granted everyday, in other words removing a proverbal drop from the software patent bucket.
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