Re: Please explain the FSF copyright assignment thing

[Andreas Röhler]

On 19.07.2017 05:32, Richard Stallman wrote:

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[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
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  > Enforced freedom? nobody there was obligated to benefit from freedom.
  > What was enforced was the obligation for Cisco to transfer to their
  > clients the freedom they decided to enjoy.

You stated that very well.

The purpose of copyleft is to defend freedom for all users of our
software.  To defend their freedom requires preventing middlemen
(Cisco in that case) from stripping off the freedom when they
redistribute the software to others.

In other words, when we distribute Emacs to A,
and A redistributes Emacs to B, C and D, copyleft protects
the freedom of B, C and D by requiring
A to pass along Emacs to them with the full four freedoms.

Are two major issues with that idea.

1) the body of enforcement
2) the probability of involuntary license violations

For the latter: it looks like distributions of Emacs itself violated the GPL, right?
The reason is simple: With growing complexity it will be probable, that binaries and sources differ at some point.
Than the distributor risks to be at the mercy of the owner.

Now if a violation occurs, who will be the judge?: The very kind of institutions which otherwise found water-boarding a legal thing. Can't see how such a proceeding will match freedom.

Whilst Emacs itself remains an excellent tool.