Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2001 14:54:57 -0800 From: David Johnson <djohnson@acuson.com> To: Trent Waddington <s337240@student.uq.edu.au> Cc: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Stallman stalls again Message-ID: <3AA56AC1.90486DEB@acuson.com> References: <Pine.OSF.4.30.0103070633520.18369-100000@student.uq.edu.au>
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Trent Waddington wrote: > > ok, you seem to just want to say "is not" in response to my quite valid > claims, so I'll leave you now. I suggest that you read a little more > about the ramifications of intellectual property, its distinction from > intellectual property law and indeed copyright law. When you have a clear > idea of how divergent intellectual property is from the purposes of > copyright law, then perhaps we can have a civil conversation. I don't know what the specific legal definitions are, since I am not a lawyer and cannot speak their obfuscated jargon. But the common thought in the US at least is that copyright is one of the intellectual properties, the others being patents, trademarks and trade secrets. That might not be the origin of copyright, but that's how it viewed by the common person. Looking over the old debates on copyright, I see that they used the term "intellectual property" as well. One valid definition of property is that the owner gets to control access to it. Thus a copyrighted work is property. "Intellectual" may be the wrong adjective to use, but that's beside the point. It doesn't much matter to me if there are copyright laws or not. Both Free/Open Software and proprietary/closed software can exist with or without official government recognition. Indeed, through a quirk of history, most proprietary software licenses are based on contract law instead of copyright law. David To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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