The chilling effects of copyleft
I’m a programmer. I enjoy writing code, especially reusable software components. I don’t believe in copyrights, certainly not on software. Code may be written by someone, but it can not, should not, be owned by anyone. Code is maths, and owning code is akin to owning pi, or e, and restricting what kind of thinking other people can do. I think we are way past the point where copyrights hinders innovation, rather than encourage it as originally intended.
Copyleft is an idea popularized by GNU and the Free Software Foundation, that claims to work towards ensuring certain freedoms when it comes to software, by publishing software under the GNU General Public License (GPL), that has as one of its main points that derivative works can only be distributed under the same or a compatible license.
The problem is that people might want to release their source code under a freer license, but also wish to not reinvent code already released under the GPL. The GPL thus cause extra work for the principled programmer, who will have to laboriously write new code to do exactly the same that the GPL code does, while being careful not to copy, or base the design of the new library, on the old one. In the worst case such a task is too much, and innovation that would otherwise happen fails to come about, and everyone is impoverished as a result.
Richard Stallman raves against “software hoarding”; companies that take some free product, adds in their own innovations, and releases the result with a more restrictive license, commercially. He writes that this makes software less free. Which is just plain wrong. Because if someone takes free software A, improves it, and releases unfree software B, the world has more freedom. Software A does not go away, everyone can still use and base their improvements on that piece, ignoring B, but in addition they also have the choice of using B. The company that makes B might not be very nice, they are accepting a gift, and not giving back in turn. But they are still doing some good, they are still innovating. Their ideas, if not their code, can be utilized in free software. (Granted that software patents, an even greater evil than copyrights, don’t apply.)
The GNU GPL works within current law. It strongly relies on copyrights. To enforce it, the laws and law enforcement mechanisms are utilized. If the copyright laws were weakened, the GPL would lose some of its power. The GPL thus gives programmers who have released under the license an incentive to work towards upholding copyright laws. But copyright laws are inherently dangerous; the law essentially dictates what Joe Hacker and Bob Hacker can do with their own personal property, their own computers. To enforce such a thing, law enforcement must be able to detect when Joe distributes some piece of information to Bob. The transfer might be encrypted for privacy, so now law enforcement has to have a way to force encryption keys from suspects, or encryption must be banned entirely. The transfer might be on a completely private network, so now law enforcement has to have a way to tell when any person is communicating with any other through privately owned equipment, or networks must be forced to register its traffic with authorities, and hidden networks banned. Giving law enforcement such powers, or banning such things, violates basic civil and human rights.
An ethical programmer will avoid assist in maintaining copyrights. He will release the code he writes on his own into the public domain. He will help write libraries that duplicate what GPL and proprietary libraries do, but this time, make them really free. And he will be free to lobby for weakening copyright laws and the enforcement thereof, free to acts of civil disobedience that undermines copyrights, and free to stand up for the basic rights of privacy and presumption of innocence.