<nettime> Re: St. Columba: The patron saint of copyleft...

["R. A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com>]

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Status:  U
Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2002 17:44:22 -0800
From: Somebody
To: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah@SHIPWRIGHT.COM>
Subject: Re: St. Columba: The patron saint of copyleft...
User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i

You may want to be careful with that word "copyleft." It does not, as your
mail implies, stand as an opposite to "copyright." Quite the opposite, in
fact: copyleft is the exercise of copyright for a political purpose, to
force software freedom (as in liberty) upon consumers as a condition of
use, which of course would be quite impossible without the power of
copyright to wield over them.

The facile opposite of copyright is, I suppose, public domain. But then
copyright was supposedly invented to entice creation into the open that
would otherwise have remained secret (or un-made), so depending on whose
politics you subscribe to, the functional opposite of copyright may well
be "trade secret". Would the monk have lent his manuscript, had he known
of the intent to copy without compensation?

<Somebody's .sig>

P.S.: Great story.


Perry The Cynic                                             perry@cynic.org
To a blind optimist, an optimistic realist must seem like an Accursed Cynic.
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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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