Posted on 02/24/2010 7:16:42 AM PST by ShadowAce
It's only Tuesday and already it's been an interesting week for the world of digital rights. Not only did the British government changed the wording around its controversial 'three strikes' proposals, but the secretive anti-counterfeiting treaty, Acta, was back in the headlines. Meanwhile, a US judge is still deliberating over the Google book settlement.
As if all that wasn't enough, here's another brick to add to the teetering tower of news, courtesy of Andres Guadamuz, a lecturer in law at the University of Edinburgh.
Guadamuz has done some digging and discovered that an influential lobby group is asking the US government to basically consider open source as the equivalent of piracy - or even worse.
What?
It turns out that the International Intellectual Property Alliance, an umbrella group for organisations including the MPAA and RIAA, has requested with the US Trade Representative to consider countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India for its "Special 301 watchlist" because they use open source software.
What's Special 301? It's a report that examines the "adequacy and effectiveness of intellectual property rights" around the planet - effectively the list of countries that the US government considers enemies of capitalism. It often gets wheeled out as a form of trading pressure - often around pharmaceuticals and counterfeited goods - to try and force governments to change their behaviours.
Now, even could argue that it's no surprise that the USTR - which is intended to encourage free market capitalism - wouldn't like free software, but really it's not quite so straightforward.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
When you download Open Source Software, you are downloading Communism. (Cue Spooky Music)
Speaking of Spooky Music, what ever happened to Golden Eagle?
If you outlaw open source.... ah, skip it.
He just faded away.
Look. The fascists at the RIAA and MPAA strike again!
Hardware has long been a commodity, thus why it is so cheap, and software is quickly going that way as well. Capitalism still has a much needed place in services to support and augment the commodities. A person or business should be able to choose the products that make the most sense to them...poey on this kind of crap.
Mozilla *does* use communist-inspired graphics.
You forgot the "/sarc" tag. :)
Yep - I forgot it. Sorry.
(posted with Mozilla Firefox)
Probably, cause his funding ran out!
If I were President, I would have the DOJ conduct a RICO investigation of those two organizations.
Open source users are subversives, commies, and a blight on free enterprise. (Shuffling sound while BtD riffles through his Microsoft stock). Except when it’s me.
At some point, all operating systems will be free or close to it just like a great many virtualization products are now. Money will be made on service and support, customizations, etc of those products. Intellectual property is something we’ve gone overboard on in this country in many cases and the biggest screamers are the ones the least likely to be stolen from and are probably the biggest thieves. I guess the free market does indeed work until somebody puts out something for free...LOL
LOL!
I've tried the conversion from Microsoft Office to Open Office a couple of times now but the latest version is finally going to hook me, it looks like. Nice job, IMHO.
And yeah, I've been preaching for years now that what we're likely to see is apps like Microsoft Office running on open-source OS's. So what am I running on my laptop at the moment? Yeah, you guessed it - Open Office on top of Windows 7. Sheesh. ;-)
Patents/copyrights have a long tradition of taking things in the open source community and limiting their access for profit.
Post-it notes are a good example. For a hundred plus years print shops would take their scrap paper, jog it in stairsteps, apply rubber cement (or similar) and quickly collapse the stair-steps to create post-it noted. It was in the public domain. It never occurred to anyone that this open process could be patented. Then 3M came along with a hokey story and a great PR blitz that snowed people into believing it could have exclusive ownership fo what had been in open source for a century.
The status of some code is curious. Sears and IBM created ADVANTIS. Then Allstate, Discover, Coldwell-Banker children of Sears continued to USE ADVANTIS as did unrelated firms like Spiegel. As a consultant I could bounce from shop to shop and have access to all that code I knew had come from other shops. Every shop encouraged all designers and coders to “steal” the code already written. And yes, the word “steal” was used in writing with the flippant inference expected. ADVANTIS expected it to be a big selling point that such a large base of proven re-usable code was available to ADVANTIS users.
For various reasons IBM and Sears didn’t know how to capitalize on what they had. The potential was barely touched.
I know open source has a tendency to be linked to socialist ideals, but I also think it's an example of the free market in action. When companies can't compete with huge, crushing competitors, they route around it and find another way to reduce costs and compete. Most FOSS isn't state-owned: it just takes price elasticity to its logical conclusion and uses free as a stick to beat its competitors with (would you ever accuse Google, which gives its main product away for free, of being anti-capitalist?).
This is as clueless a statement about Open Source as it gets. It never was about companies wanting to use software without license fees. It was about people who wanted certain software (particularly system software) that was not for sale so they wrote it themselves. It just so happens that we gave away the results of our labors so others could benefit and build upon our work.
I got into Open Source (before the name was coined) when I had an AT&T Unix PC (aka PC7300) that was at EOL and certain highly annoying and possibly dangerous bugs were never going to be fixed. In my case it was a bug in strip(1) that caused executables to be deleted if strip was run on already stripped binary. More generally, I do not ever want to be held hostage to system software that I cannot fix when I find a problem.
It's very nice that someone finds our work useful, but without those of us who did all the work, there wouldn't be any Open Source for non-programmers to take advantage of.
I find the situation described in the article as absurd in the extreme. What about my intellectual property rights? I contributed to Open Source software with the express condition that the result be freely distributable in source.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.