| Hi again, No. Copyright can be used to protect moral rights, [...]. In places where moral rights are in the law, they are not subject to copyright at all. It doesn't matter. [...] Whether there are legal systems without copyright is irrelevant to this. Sorry, I think we are just disagreeing on the definition of copyright here. I use the definition that moral rights are under the umbrella of copyright. For example, Wikipedia defines moral rights as "rights of creators of copyrighted works generally recognized in civil law jurisdictions and, to a lesser extent, in some common law jurisdictions" [1]. You could have moral rights without property rights, but not without copyright. And, again, I don't think there are any countries that actually have moral rights without property rights, which I do consider important for discussing the claim that respecting property rights is unnecessary. What licenses would those be, if there's no copyright? You're still thinking in a matter formatted by the current US law. You claimed that moral rights were important, but property rights were not (or maybe I've misunderstood). The MIT license is generally protective of moral rights (attribution), while the GPL protects both moral rights and property rights (attribution and "you may use the code under these conditions"). By saying moral rights are only important, it's the same as saying any GPL code could be re-licensed under the MIT license. So the situation I mentioned was using previously GPLed code in a closed-source binary, because the company does not respect the copyright (property rights) of the author, even if they keep the attribution (moral rights). The original topic discussed was: "If you believe in open source, then you need to be respectful of copyright law. It is the foundation for open source licensing." Which I think is made clear by the example. By nobody respecting property rights, closed-source binaries could use GPLed code, with the stipulation that the binaries themselves can be reverse engineered legally. It isn't a good trade-off. The binaries are no longer proprietary (i.e. have ownership rights), but are still very hard to use. As I said earlier, a law could be promulgated that granted the author the right only to prevent others from using code written by him in proprietary binaries - while not granting him/her the right to restrict any other copying. This itself sounds like a copyright law that grants certain property rights to the author. Earlier you mentioned abolishing "economic rights" and stated "essentially, the attribution right is the goal". But, as it turns out, some property rights are liked ("I made this, so I want to release it under X condition!"), so if you expect others to respect your terms, it is important to respect theirs, imo. That's why I consider respecting copyright to be important for open source -- to me it seems like the "golden rule" of authoring code; if I want my GPL code to be protected, I should respect the license of their proprietary code. I don't have any more time for the discussion, but I think I've expressed my view the best I can. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights |