08.16
I have long been fascinated with copyright law and the various legal abuses of power that come with creation of original thought. In case you haven’t heard, there has been much talk about the recent appeals court ruling that the Artistic License is a copyright agreement and not a contract or covenant. Here are some of the pages discussing the landmark case:
- Brian D. Foy
- Brian D. Foy (again)
- Lawrence Lessig
- Slashdot
- Groklaw
- The Perl Foundation
- Wired
- InfoWorld
- The Register
- TechDirt
- InternetNews
- InformationWeek
- Washington Post
- New York Times
Needless to say, this is an extremely important win for open source. Actually, it’s even more important to Perl because of its use of the Artistic License (version 2). This basically validates everyone’s effort in open source as a valid (collective) copyright holder even though no currency exchange is required by the license.
So now that the courts have validated the GPLv2 license in the SCO versus everything Linux related and the Artistic License has been validated, it’s safe to say that these are legitimate copyright notices. More importantly, copyright is still enforcable even in an open source community.
It’s ironic because if I tell non-technical people that I contribute to open source, they usually think I am an idiot for “giving something (anything) away for free.” They usually cannot wrap their anachronistic brains around the idea that perhaps it’s possible to have a passion for something that extends beyond any corporate interest.
Not all that glitters is gold.
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