[Gllug] [OT] Selling GPL

[Jason Clifford]

On Mon, 2007-12-03 at 17:24 +0000, Stephen Nelson-Smith wrote:
> Intellectual Property Rights.  Given that I know almost nothing about
> this area of law, but was familiar with the acronymn, I assumed others
> would be in the same position.  As to the difference between copyright
> and intellectual property, IANAL, but it seems likely there's a
> difference.

The important difference is that there is no such thing as "intellectual
property" while there is such a thing as copyright.

"Intellectual property" is a phrase coined by those who are in the
business of convincing us to treat the privileges they have benefited
from under copyright as real property rights and so to deprive us of the
privileges we have enjoyed as part of the social bargain that copyright
is.

If the privileges of users are not to be upheld I'd say holders of
copyright should not continue to enjoy the privileges it gives them
either. Actually what I believe is that both sides should enjoy the
benefits of the social bargain fairly and I generally support copyright.

Usually I steer away from the hardline Stallman position however in
respect of the term "intellectual property" I believe he is right.

If you change the language you change the way people think. Using
phrases such as IP and copyright theft is a deliberate attempt to change
how we view our social bargain to our detriment. 

>   I may be entirely wrong, and the two terms may be
> interchangeable - but copyright didn't occur to me, and intellectual
> property did.

"IPR" usually refers to a combination of several totally unrelated
things - copyright, patents and trade marks. By combining them under a
single term some people apparently hope to confuse us into allowing them
to abuse their privileges under one thing by claiming the privileges of
another for it which are not rightful.

> Right - so, for example, a product that ships code that makes use of
> debconf, provided it is made clear that debconf is used, and the
> license given, the supplier is ok.

Using debconf should not matter. It's just a call to an external
programme. It's not linked into the code that is shipped.

Jason

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