Re: [Patents] removal of copyright protection ?

[Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>]

PILCH Hartmut wrote:


> [...] I tend to think that property in individual creation is something close 
> to
> a natural right.  [...]


I believe this is what is copyright all about, it has worked well for 
"individual"
creation like books or songs, even if someone might argue that with mass 
marketing
the original intent, protect the author against the editors, has been 
somewhat
reversed and the system looks more like a star system (a few stars get 
everything,
everyone else is a slave to the editors).

*But* software and algorithm have turned out to be a lot different than
books and songs IMHO. You can, and as a software engineer I do it
every hour I work for my employer, cut, tweak, hybrid, merge different
algorithms and software.

If you look at massive collaborative efforts
that happened in the software field, you will often find one
individual creating a "spark" around a set of old published ideas,
adapt it to current time, and then gather a lot of valuable work
from a lot of people for "free", and in software you
need a strong maintenance phase to keep up with new
hardware and ideas. I don't believe a single author
could maintain modern software alone, collaborative
work is the only way to go.

Think RMS and Emacs (editor with a strong programming language
instead of crappy macros), GCC/GDB (generic portable compilers and 
debuggers),
Linus with the Linux kernel (use "free" software and old UNIX ideas on
cheap and in some sense "free" harware), the Apache group
formed by a few authors to grow up a web server software
able to keep up with the internet, etc...

These people and efforts had to protect themselves and their ideas
from some of the vicious effects of the copyright and more recently 
patent systems,
and I believe the public got a lot of benefit *without* the incentive of
copyright and patents.

I hope that some day lawmakers will realize that, and frame
an appropriate legal system to protect and formalize all this kind
of massive collaborative work that tremendously benefits
to the public instead of letting it collapse under
lawsuits, license errance and idiotic new laws
bought by the ones who benefit from the current system
and don't want a new one to emerge.

To reuse your sentence, I tend to think that collective
creation in the software field
has raised to the status of a natural right too.
And I wouldn't be surprised if from software
it gets back to science, history and arts with
"unexpected" benefits to the public.

Sincerely,
--
Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>