In preparing for the ICT and Poverty Reduction meeting, I had an email exchange with somebody from the IPI. Here is a relevant copy of my posting.
From: Alex Schroeder alex@gnu.org Subject: Re: RE : Sitzung Arbeitsgruppe ICT zur Armutsbekämpfung 12 Mai 2003
“Mettraux, Catherine” Catherine.Mettraux@ipi.ch writes:
De plus, comme je l’ai déjà mentionné dans mes prises de position > précédentes, les questions de propriété intellectuelle et en > particulier de droit d’auteur sont déjà réglées au niveau > international par les conventions existantes. Ces conventions > tiennent déjà compte des besoins des utilisateurs et il n’y a pas > lieu de les remettre en question. C’est pourquoi, je suis d’avis que > les passages du plan d’action et de la déclaration relative à la > propriété intellectuelle doivent être biffés.
Well, just because there is international regulation does not mean that we don’t have to do something about it. For example, the US has software patents, and the EU is introducing software patents right now – and what about Switzerland? I think the movement for software patents is just a question of lobbying, and the Free Software movement strongly opposes this, since it greatly hampers our work. If you are interested in the position and arguments, I would like to point you to the a very nice, short and very readable summary: http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/patent-reform-is-not-enough.html Software patents introduce very many uncertainties during software development, because you never know if somebody suddenly surfaces with a patents claim. The best solution would be no software patents, the second best solution would be a very short time span for the patent monopoly – eg. 5 years instead of 25.
http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/patent-reform-is-not-enough.html
As for copyright, the problem is different. Some free software developpers use copyright to protect their software against people that want to take their free software and incorporate it into their proprietary software. The problem I am addressing, however, is a different one: Laws like the DMCA in the US, and the new Urheberrecht in Germany, extend copyright law: They forbid to reverse engineer software that is protected from reverse engineering. This can make development of device drivers for Linux illegal, if the producer of the device does not offer a device driver himself. And often the producers do not. Therefore, as you can see, by curbing the extent of the protection (ie. the number of years), we achieve more freedom for users. I suggest a different copyright span for software. Five years seems to be a good compromise for example. Who wants to use software already 5 years old, when they can buy the newest software? Just as books fall out of copyright and enter the public domain, software should, too. But while a book remains of interest even 70 years after its author’s death (the length of copyright protection in the US), clearly there is no software whose author is already 70 years dead. To have the same copyright span for books and software makes no sense.
These two points I tried to make. If you find some fault in the reasoning, or some point in my message that contradicts this, I would be happy to correct it, so please speak up and indicate which part of it you find problematic.
En ce qui concerne les logiciels libres, respectivement “open > source”, leur encouragement est parfaitement possible en l’état > actuel du droit et je n’aurais rien contre le fait que la Suisse > s’engage pour un tel encouragement (sous réserve de l’avis des autres > offices compétents). Par contre, il ne serait pas acceptable que la > Suisse exige (comme le propose M. Schroeder) que tous les logiciels > soient obligatoirement “libres” ou “open source”.
I am sure we all agree that to demand all software to be free makes no sense. Some part of my message must have been confusing, therefore, because I am sure I did not ask for such a thing. Could you please point out to me, where I did ask for that (”...tous les logicels soient obligatoirement...”)?
Regards, Alexander Schröder Wilhelm Tux