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

Tomasz Wegrzanowski taw at users.sourceforge.net
Sat Oct 20 21:16:13 UTC 2001


On Sat, Oct 20, 2001 at 09:58:05PM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
> > 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.

How could contracts and NDAs bring us DMCAs, protocol/fileformat/look&feel patents or CD tax ?
You need two sides for a contract, copyrights and patents can affect you
even if you didn't sign anything.

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

Well, communism also wasn't 20 years ago.
At least everyone thought it wasn't.
Manmade structures don't last long.
Copyright will go away sooner or later.



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