From: mark@unicorn.com
Date: Mon, 9 Feb 1998 23:16:21 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Re: the best justice money can buy --Lessig (fwd)
Message-ID: <887036600.23860.193.133.230.33@unicorn.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Jim Choate (ravage@ssz.com) wrote:
>So do I, and I bet both our incomes combined doesn't add up to 15 minutes of
>Bill G's and it won't. 

Of course not, because Bill has jackbooted copyright enforcers to subsidise
his corporation. Without them his income would be dramatically reduced.

>From a market perspective we're flies on the back of
>great elephant. Please be so kind as to describe how and why this marketing
>mechanism (copyleft) will succed? 

Uh, I said copyright should be abolished, you said noone would write
software, I said that Linux disproved that claim. How is this relevant
to that discussion? Of course it's not going to take over when companies
can get billions of dollars of subsidies in the form of copyright
enforcement, but it clearly shows that without copyright people will
produce better software than Microsfot has ever written.

>I've been using and supporting Linux since
>1993 (SSZ is listed as a source site in the back of 'Running Linux' since 
>day one) in this manner neither I or anyone else has gotten rich.

Exactly. So tell us how Bill would have become a billionaire without
copyright?

>It's copyrighted in the important sense in that it uses the copyright to
>enforce its conditions. That is just as important as the marketing decisions
>made by it.

All it enforces is source-code distribution (and I've yet to hear of a single
case where it's ever been used). That's important to the developers, but not 
to the average user. The situation would be little changed in a world with 
no copyright, because if anyone did try to keep their source secret anyone 
who got a copy could freely distribute it.

I'm truly amazed to find all these pro-copyright views on the list, when
cypherpunks have been at the forefront of creating technologies to make it
unenforceable and obsolete.

    Mark