[DMCA-Activists] Re: Eric Grimm re: Zittrain: Call Off the Copyright War

[Richard Stallman]

    There's a huge opportunity here to examine with great care
    some of the largely unexamined assumptions underlying the
    debate over "intellectual property."

Any debate about "intellectual property" tends to be idiotic.  That
term lumps together areas of law that have nearly nothing in common,
including copyrights and patents.  At that level of abstraction, the
real issues are not even visible.  Even if you use scare quotes, that
term gets in the way.

The first step towards achieving clarity is to reject the overlarge
category of "intellectual property", and talk about copyrights and
patents separately.  For more explanation, see
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html.

The word "create" as used to describe writing is also somewhat biased,
and I suggest avoiding it.

As for whether people will write without pay, we do not need to
speculate that they will.  In the Free Software community there are
half a million people who volunteer to write free software.  There are
also at least hundreds who are paid to write free software--paid, that
is, without preventing people from copying and redistributing what
they write.  After just 3 years, the free encyclopedia Wikipedia is
now 1/3 the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica.  At least in the area
of works that are used to a job, we know now that restricting users
from sharing is simply unnecessary.

See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/ for more information about the
philosophy of free software.