Linus on copyright and "fair use"
thread.gmane.org
thread.gmane.org
http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p09_fair_use
But, in most ways it is less permissive than US 'fair use'. There again, most of the US fair use rationale isn't codified per se, but based on court interpretation and precedence, and since the UK has nowhere near the level of precedence in that area, it's understandable.
The UK fair use policy DOES offer some slightly more permissive commercial uses however, for example recent spates of youtube videos being pulled because a commercial song was playing on a radio in the background would be 'fair use due to incidental usage' under UK law.
I coincidentally just attended a briefing on copyright given by our lawyers on Thursday and the basic message was that the exemptions are complex and incredibly tight and have gotten much tighter recently (particularly "non-commercial" is a shadow of its former self).
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing
"Fair dealing is an enumerated set of possible defenses against an action for infringement of an exclusive right of copyright. Unlike the related United States doctrine of fair use, fair dealing cannot apply to any act which does not fall within one of these categories. In practice, common law courts might rule that actions with a commercial character, which might be naïvely assumed to fall into one of these categories, were in fact infringements of copyright as fair dealing is not as flexible a concept as the American concept of fair use."
The fact that "fair dealing" is a list of narrow exemptions in the legislation, rather than a general concept is why we're still waiting for new legislation that will allow us to legally rip CDs to put on our iPods while in the US a judge can decide that it is "fair use".
Pretty old news.
Keep in mind that the GPL is not an end in and of itself; it's a cute little legal hack to create a self-contained domain that simulates a world without copyright, with a one-way boundary to ensure that things stay inside that domain (there's a fairly straightforward game theory analysis of why this gives GPL-style licenses a competitive advantage over BSD-style licenses, but that's getting off topic).
So, in that context, it actually makes sense to simultaneously support strict enforcement of the GPL and oppose copyright.
Of course, most people don't think copyright is intrinsically immoral and thus won't find the above perspective persuasive, but I'm pretty sure that's roughly where people like RMS are coming from.
I think even that isn't the end in and of itself. The ultimate goal of GPL is freedom. In a totally copyright-free world one could make GPL code derivatives restricted by hardware that only runs signed binaries (tivoization).
I don't actually think the source code publishing requirement is necessary; something like CC BY-SA would probably suffice.
Classing things as strictly "bad" and "good" is too simplistic for most situations. Most things have elements of good and bad.
My apologies, I agree with you.