Re: gpl licensing

[David Golden]

"Without copyright law the GPL would be unenforceable.
It would also be unnecessary"

FSF supporters tend to be predominantly libertarian gun-nuts in my
experience, not marxists.  I'm not saying there aren't people who
self-identify as marxists or communists who support the FSF, it's
cross-spectrum, however: Something pretty akin to Marx's labour theory
of value is commonly used to "justify" copyright law - the idea that
something is in some way "worth" the amount of work it took to create
rather than what it might fetch on the free market is essentially
marxist.  Copyright and patent laws' oft-stated primary motivations are
basically socialistic:  "help the starving artists / authors /
programmers", "encourage science and the useful arts" etc. -
deliberately granting long monopolies to certain people to allow them
to AVOID free-market competition.

Because 'obviously', if there were a free market in such things, nothing
would ever get produced.  Riiight. (that was sarcasm).

Some propagandists use the term "intellectual property", but that
doesn't make copyright (or patent) law a particularly defensible or
necessary part of a "capitalist" system.   Such monopolies even act to
undermine and devalue physical property rights.

See also "Against Intellectual Property" by Stephen Kinsella.
http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf