is copyright evil? (Re: about warez.at)

[MJ Ray]

Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sourceforge.net> writes:

> Without copyright law there would be no proprietary software companies
> (why would they exist ?), so there would be no problem.

This is very naive.  If there was no copyright law, contract law would
merely take its place.  Indeed, in many things where it is felt that
copyright is insufficient to protect the knowledge (usually where that
knowledge takes the form of general principles rather than specific
works based upon them), contract law is already used for this purpose,
in the form of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and similar.

I think the recent question on NDAs was to this list.  FS supporters
should definitely be at least concerned by them.

Copyright isn't going anywhere soon, but if/when it does, we'll only
be confronted by the same problem in a different form.
-- 
MJR

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