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Re: Design principles and ethics


From: Bas Wijnen
Subject: Re: Design principles and ethics
Date: Thu, 4 May 2006 21:06:45 +0200
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.11+cvs20060403

On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 06:52:53PM +0200, Pierre THIERRY wrote:
> > We have all these cool new options, but we'll block them because some
> > guys with a lot of money are too lazy to come up with a new business
> > plan.
> 
> That's very harsh and I suspect you have no regular author or artist in
> your relatives.

Actually, I do. :-)  But as I mentioned in the mail I just sent, I wasn't
planning to leave them without money.  I just want them to be paid in a way
that doesn't bring so much trouble to society.  It's good for society if works
can be copied.  The only reason copyright exists is to make people produce
more, not because they deserve that fundamental right or something.  I'm
saying we should find some other way to make them produce more (and that
likely involves giving them money), without charging people per copy.

> But there is here a deep difference between me and at least Marcus and
> you: I am deeply convinced that we should let people do bad things that
> only harm themselves.

I agree with you there.  And when designing an operating system, I will not
discard most cases of "this can be used to harm people".  However, here it
seems to be a case of "this can and will certainly be used to harm people, and
there may not be any use for it that we consider good".  Implementing such a
feature in the operating system does technically also increase freedom.  But
it will result in a system which is worse for users than a system without the
feature.

> That is, if some software author wants to publish closed source and ask
> a giantic fee, no problem.

I agree.  But they can do that using methods that are available (which are, by
the way, not any more limited than what they have now).  We don't need to add
extra torture chambers in the OS because some companies want the "freedom" to
torture our users.

> I am aware that in some cases, at least when there is collusion or
> monopoly, their freedom to do anything with their own work begins to
> harm the freedoms of others.

That too, but there's not much we can do about it anyway.

> But I'm also convinced that there are much better way to fight those
> cases than forbidding those unethical behaviours.

I'm not.  If we implement features which are much more capable of locking
users out of their property than current mechanisms, then we will have a very
hard time to make sure companies don't use those features.  Since they have a
lot more money, we will likely fail (and they might get our feature prescribed
in law).

> Free software is a very good example. There has been, and there still is, a
> struggle against proprietary software, and this latters clearly harm
> society.

I don't understand what you mean with that.

> But when you fight too directly the evil that is inside human nature,
> instead of bringing the good that is inside it to fight for you, I'm
> really convinced you do more harm than good.

I agree.  But we are not talking about removing a freedom that people have in
this case.  We are talking about adding a "freedom" to enslave.  People won't
miss it, since they didn't have it before.

> To sum up, I think the fact that some of us can harm the others because
> we abuse our own freedoms is sometimes a price to pay for the humanity
> to evolve for the better. It is very difficult, though, to distinguish
> when the harm is too much compared to what freedom should be taken to
> avoid it.

I agree.

> In the case of copyright, I still think reasoning only about the cost is
> delusional. It has never been the real issue. For what I know, never.

It is an issue insofar that if copying is so easy and cheap, it can't be
controlled anymore.  It's like putting a tax on pointing at a forest.  It
doesn't cost anything, and it's trivial to do.  Most of the time, nobody will
notice.  Therefore, it's unenforcable.

> As Marcus cited Hegel, one's work is something that reflects himself, it's a
> part of him. It should lead us to give some control to the author on his
> work. If you give too much freedom to the public here, you could do a lot of
> harm to authors.

Well, giving people a bad name by quoting them out of context is illegal.  And
I think that's a good thing.  But that doesn't mean that quoting (in the
original form or modified) should be prevented.  It only means that proper
credit must be given when doing it.

> BTW, I have a question for the sake of curiosity: do you place
> everything you produce in public domain?

First of all, I don't publish everything I produce.  Things I don't publish
don't have a license.  Things I write in public places (like this mailing
list) I consider public domain, yes.  All code I write and publish, I license
under the GNU GPL.  I would be happy if public domain would work, but
unfortunately that would mean that other people can use it and "protect" it
through copyright.  I would consider no copyright an improvement over the GPL,
even though that would mean people can use the code without disclosing the
source.

So: given the existence of copyright, and the fact that other people (ab)use
it, I use copyright to protect against that.

> I would tend to agree that copyright term should be lowered now, instead
> of extending it. I think it should be a great way to adapt to our new
> millenium. FWIW, we should do the same for patents, which would make
> them less dangerous and then less useful for those who abuse them.

For both I would say "the shorter the better". :-)  With 0 as the optimum.

> > > I'm less sure about patents.
> > Patents are even worse, and also even more off-topic. ;-)
> 
> Patents are all but a trivial issue.

Not trivial at all, indeed.

Thanks,
Bas

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