Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cm2187 3932 days ago
Why wouldn't they? Even open source software comes with a license that restricts exactly that.
3 comments

There's a greater good argument to be made that people shouldn't be denied access to education and culture simply based on the country they live in or how much money they have.
But in all western countries that does not invalidate copyrights.

And in this particular case, I am not sure Games of Thrones qualifies as "education and culture".

While I agree that you are correct under current laws the position as I see it is about it should be fully legal to copy any publicly published piece of information.

I am not too worried that literature and art will go away. Literature and art existed before we had avenues for mass audience to buy or rent personal copies and they will continue to exist after we dismantle copyright.

I'd like to note that I support trademarks. I do not condone people selling modified versions of Microsoft Windows including keyloggers that call home to the seller and claiminf it is official, unmodified Windows. One shouldn't sell malware with someone else's trademark on it. The problem as fsf explains well is that we have grouped disparate things together under vague intellectual property when the entire exercise is anything but intellectual.

It definitely counts as culture. Today's literature was yesterday's mass market serial.
It fits the very definition of culture.
If that's true, then the government should be paying these people to produce the content. Otherwise you're saying that poor people are entitled to content for free, without the creator getting anything.
Except that they use it in a kind of legal judo move, making sure anyone getting it from you get the same rights as you got it under.

Never mind that there are a bunch of companies, in particular in the embedded market, that violate it left and right.

For me, open source restrictions are merely a consolation prize. I'd gladly give them up tomorrow along with the rest of copyright.
Without the restrictions of the GPL we might not have OpenWrt, many Linux modules, or near universal hardware support for gcc.

If we can find a way to ensure we can get those without copyleft, alright, but so far copyright is the only legal tool we have.

So the penalty is just having to switch to *BSD and LLVM?