[sclug] Cheap'n'nasty Tesco Linux machines

[Phillip Chandler]

Thats one of the points I was trying to make, unfortunately Dickon Hood
made the point better than I ever could.

Practically everything is copyrighted, even FOSS is probably
copyrighted, in the sense that your given the right to modify and
redistribute, as long as the original source code is available, you
credit the people who created the code and you make no charge for what
you modified. Basically if you got it for free, you give it away for
free, modified or not. The GPL is basically a form of copyright, which
gives users the above rights. Thats my very basic understanding of it
all. Your given rights to protect what you can and cant do.

So if I wanted to get technical and split hairs then whoever said that
multimedia codecs are "evil and morally and ethically wrong", I forget
who it was, is then at some point probably using copyright software on
their machines, whether its licensed under the GPL or not. Can I get
away with that ? Or should I quit while Im not too deep in the *&^%

On Sun, 2008-03-16 at 17:01 +0000, Dickon Hood wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 01:40:47 +0000, mail at europa.demon.co.uk wrote:
> 
> : As a "rodney" (please retract that if we are to continue any discussion) I 
> : understand "licensing" perfectly well, I simply consider it morally and 
> : ethically wrong, and I can inform you that copyright is not required for Free 
> : Software, it is merely a mechanism (the "copyright hack" to turn it into 
> : copyleft) which we use under the current legal system that recognises 
> : copyright to enable Free Software in the society we live in today.
> 
> That software -- or, as you've stated *anything* copyrightable --
> television programme, film, book, or recording, was not produced for
> nothing: it takes resources to produce all of these things.
> 
> Is it not morally and ethically right to allow the entity which spent
> those resources some mechanism to recover those costs?  Surely it isn't
> ethical to deny a writer or a filmmaker the fruits of their labour?
> 
> There wouldn't be much left of the entertainment industries left if not.
>