[d@DCC] Response to Globe Article on unauthorized downloading

[Russell McOrmond]

Wallace J.McLean wrote:

> "Someone else" -- nature -- already has done this. It is physically 
> impossible, in this universe, to physically control every act 
> of "sharing".

   The same is true of every other man-made law, so I don't see your 
point.  You never need to have a man-made law for something that is 
built into nature.  In fact we make man-made laws specifically to 
suggest social things which are different than our nature (deter murder, 
etc) to fulfill some larger public policy purpose.

> The Copyright Act cannot possible cover off every possibility for how 
> and when something is "shared", and nor should it. Our laws must, 
> implicitly and where necessarily expressly, admit of an ambient degree 
> of "sharing".

   This is beside the point.  You took one sentence in a letter to the 
editor and tried to interpret it as if it was an encyclopedia that 
provided an impossible level of detail.

   We can all do the reverse and believe from your one word (why?) that 
you are anti-creator, anti-innovator and believe that governments should 
abrogate article 27(2) of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

   I believe there is considerable room to debate the meaning of article 
27 (the entirety, not the second half that some extremists focus on), 
but think it is a different situation to ignore it.

> What would you refrain from creating?

   Impossible to say, given without copyright I doubt we would have this 
software to be having this conversation via ;-)

   Without licenses and copyright there would be no way to impose a tie 
of the source code to the distribution of binary software, meaning that 
copyright protects the type of software I work with.  If all software 
was in the public domain, then we would have some that is FLOSS (that 
which came with source code) and some that was not (that which did not 
come with source code) and no lever to try to encourage more software to 
be distributed with source code.

   If I didn't have a way to leverage my own software to encourage 
others to release their software as FLOSS (copyleft), then there is a 
fair bit of software that I never would have written as adequate 
motivation to do so would not have existed.  While I get paid for much 
of the software that I write, I don't always get paid enough for the 
money to be enough motivation.

-- 
  Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
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