Re: [Patents] gnu & patents

[critto@wp.pl]

From:                   "mag" <mag@bunuel.tii.matav.hu>
Subject:                Re: [Patents] gnu & patents
To:                     Hartmut Pilch <phm@a2e.de>
Copies to:              taavid@hot.ee, Patent forum <patents@aful.org>
Date sent:              03 May 2003 14:51:50 +0200

> 2003-05-03, szo keltez‚ssel Hartmut Pilch ezt ¡rta:
>
> > You may be confusing patents and copyright.
>
> These come from different viewpoints, but there is
> a good reason for confusion: both are Intellectual
> Property laws, and both are widely abused to protect
> and enhance the monopoly of big IT players.
> In hungary we have much more harder rules in the copyright
> law for software than for other forms of art. If you
> buy a pirated game for your son on its original CD in
> the local flea market, you can sit in the jail for five
> years. And that law _is_ enforced upon us.

Would the software patents be legalised in the EU, there will be
two alternatives for any good programmer:

1. to violate the patents openly, as a mean of 'civil disobedience'
(as D. Thoreau said (non-exact quote, but its sense is preserved),
'where the government imprisons anybody unjustly, prison is the
place for the just people'. Gandhi and MLK have won on this way,
so other could win, too.

2. to violate the patents after going underground first. You know:
underground, that means: no real names (only some pseudonyms),
no real addresses; if one has to register an e-mail account, then
give a false data (or, better, register it somewhere where no
personal info is collected); use anonimizers in your contacts;
encrypt your communications, and so on. After all, it is how the
first nets were supposed to be.

There will, of course, be some who wil cry "CRIIIIME!
CRIIIMINALS!!!!", but they should be scorned, and will be scorned
by the thinking part of the society.

But as for now, let us COMBAT patents; not let them in; and even
if they do, the cause is still not lost, for one may fight to abolish
them (that's what happened with Communications Decency Act in
the USA; first it has passed, then it has been abolished by the
Supreme Court).

I hope that I'd never be forced to apply either the strategy 1. or 2.

Yours,
Krzysztof "Critto" Sobolewski
critto@wp.pl, http://www.libertaryzm.prv.pl

PS. "Magyar, lengyel, ket jo barat ..." :))