Pirate Party's copyright reform cannon could sink copyleft | Hacker News Reader

Pirate Party's copyright reform cannon could sink copyleft

arstechnica.com

11 pointsjauco9 comments

I would argue 5 years is most of a software useful lifetime. (for most software.) And open source software changes so fast, would you really if a company uses a 5 year old version of your code with doing copyleft stuff? They'd still have an incentive to use a newer version and follow your license.

Plus the benefits gained in other fields by a five year limit (think research papers, movies, music) would far outweigh anything lost to the software field.

Agreed.

Of what use would be a 5 year old version of Firefox? It would be covered in security holes and missing many modern features.

Of what use would be a 5 year old version of the Linux kernel? It would have root exploits all over the place and be missing support for lots of modern hardware.

Of what use would be a 5 year old version of mplayer? It wouldn't even be able to play Youtube videos.

Consumer software might upgrade rapidly, but business software would probably take a hit. At $10,000 a license per year times multiple licenses, a lot of business software vendors might find themselves losing clients after five years.

I completely disagree.

While the GPL and other FOSS licenses would loose power after copyright runs out (int this case, 5 years), so would propreitary licenses.

Now, it might seem that this is an unfair situation proprietary software holds the advantage, after all they can grab our source code and we can't get theirs? Right? Wrong. Name a major piece of software for which the source isn't leaked... And the Pirate Party could add a law requiring that source code be released after copyright expires for distributed works.

This means that the field is always even for all developers open or not. (Well, not quite even, there is a five year difference...) but as long as the FOSS movement is about creating good free software (as apposed to annihilating proprietary software) this doesn't matter.

> Name a major piece of software for which the source isn't leaked

Mathematica. Even Microsoft Office hasn't ever been leaked.

"I completely disagree."

Did you read the article? You are completely agreeing with RMS, who recommends that an extra proviso should be added requiring proprietary source disclosure at 5 years.

I was disagreeing with the statement that `` Pirate Party's copyright reform cannon could sink copyleft.'' I only skimmed through the article and missed that part. (In part because I'm irritated by the fact that I've seen this idea iterated several times without ever considering this option.)

In short, my bad...

Never trust a social-news-site headline. :)

Misled by the headline, I thought copylefters might have foundational objections with the short copyright terms affecting copyleft. Rather, RMS just wants a tweak to ensure proprietary source, and not just binaries, become available at the end of 5 years.

I think in practice, the point is minor. If arbitrary reverse-engineering and distribution of patched copies is allowed after 5 years, disassembly tools will get really good, really fast. The meatiest bits of public-domain but source-hidden binaries will quickly get source-equivalent coverage; creating such would be a fun/easy/legal exercise for students and hobbyists.

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