| R. A. Hettinga on Fri, 22 Mar 2002 02:13:18 +0100 (CET) |
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| <nettime> Re: St. Columba: The patron saint of copyleft... |
--- begin forwarded text Status: U Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2002 17:44:22 -0800 From: Somebody To: "R. A. Hettinga" <[email protected]> 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 [email protected] To a blind optimist, an optimistic realist must seem like an Accursed Cynic. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [email protected]> 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' # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]