Comment by SeanLuke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SeanLuke | Hacker News Reader

> The fashion industry is effectively copyright-free. Anyone can come up with a new design for a dress. If the design is successful, it will be copied and it is unpractical to try to enforce copyright. Thus, fashion designers must constantly out-innovate the competition.

The fashion industry is highly reliant on trademark. I don't think many would say this is better. It also deals in art whose individual products are much easier to design than writing a novel.

> The evidence points in the opposite direction. Germany had weak copyright laws up until the Copyright Act of 1901. Yet, maybe because of these weak laws, it became a literary and scientific power:

This is nonsense from Eckhard Höffner. England in the 1830s had a low publication rate because it had a strangling and punative publisher cartel, which Höffner completely ignores in order to make an otherwise ludicrous academic claim.

For HN, here's the big one: without copyright there would be no viral licenses.

> without copyright there would be no viral licenses.

...and no purpose for them, as their work would be done.

You really don't understand the purpose of the Affero GPL?

The general purpose of copyleft is to turn the power of the copyright regime against its pernicious effects, and thus, neutralize copyright. That said, individual licenses may have more limited stated or actual goals that follow from a presumption that freedom of information will never actually be achieved.

For the AGPL, why isn't the GPL sufficient to turn the copyright regime on its head and neutralize copyright?

Or do the people who release under the AGPL want something beyond what the GPL provides? And if that is the case, what can they use to get it other than the rights granted by copyright? Surely they could use something other than copyright to get that if it was possible.

Not really. All those GPL clauses about being forced to publish modifications would be null and void. All that GNU drama over companies taking Linux code and not publishing their modifications wouldn't hold any legal water.

> The fashion industry is highly reliant on trademark. I don't think many would say this is better.

It's better. Otherwise you would be arguing for the right to impersonate other people and businesses.

Unlike copyright, trademark has no free use provisions, no time limit, and a requirement that the trademark owner aggressively pursue action against infringers. Trademark law strongly favors corporations over individuals. Guess how Disney's going to protect Steamboat Willie now.

> without copyright there would be no viral licenses.

Without copyright, people can widely leak source code and freely create works based on leaks

>The fashion industry is highly reliant on trademark. I don't think many would say this is better.

I say it's better. How is it not?

If someone wants to spend $$$$ on a dress from some well-known designer because they want to show off their wealth, then that's fine. Other people who don't care about the brand name can spend $$ on a near-copy of that dress and look just as good, without spending so much money. If there's enough suckers out there to keep the expensive brands in business, without needing copyright laws to protect them, I don't see the problem here at all.

D uses the Boost license, which is not viral. You can use D and its source code for whatever you like.

There is no such thing as viral licenses. Only you can decide the license of your work.

If your work includes another's work, you are also bound by their licenses.

If ^ that imposes restrictions on the combined work, it is a viral license. Because it spreads beyond its original bounds.

They absolutely do exist.

If your work includes another's work, it's not just your work. If you included proprietary code in your work, it would also impose restrictions on the combined work.

The copyright is already "viral" in that one of the things copyright grants is the granting of permission to create derivative works.

https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf

> A derivative work is a work based on or derived from one or more already existing works. Common derivative works include translations, musical arrangements, motion picture versions of literary material or plays, art reproductions, abridgments, and condensations of preexisting works. Another common type of derivative work is a “new edition” of a preexisting work in which the editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications represent, as a whole, an original work.

The viral licenses of open source grants that to anyone who also follows the same license rather than requiring the equivalent a playwright to contact the right holder of a novel to ask permission to use their story as the basis for a play.

And then, as a derivative work... if someone wants to make a movie based on the play, they need to contact the playwright and the author novel and get permission again.

The restrictions of the original novel's copyright have extended beyond its original bounds of text on paper to a play and a movie.

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