[Upd-discuss] a longer term strategy for promoting the publicdomain?

[Richard Stallman]

    I've heard both Larry Lessig and Brewster Kahle use the argument that
    patents (on innovations) and copyrights (on artistic works) are similar
    legal mechanisms which allow people a limited monopoly over their ideas
    to give them an incentive to come up with them in the first place.

That very general idea is the limit of what they have in common.
However, their practical effects are different because they come from
the details that are different.

Meanwhile this small common aspect of copyrights and patents does not
apply to trademarks or trade secrets, although they too are commonly
included in what some people call "intellectual property".

    However, in a his lecture in Edinburgh on Free Software, RMS stressed
    the importance of keeping the ideas of patents and copyrights seperate
    because of the impending vote on software patents at the European
    Parliament. This is because the Free Software Foundation's GPL trumps
    copyright with "copyleft", but is powerless against patent law because
    of this idea of "technical innovation" the legislation attempts to
    embody.

Yes, that is our situation.  If we don't get people to distinguish
between copyrights and patents, we have trouble explaining why patents
are so dangerous to all programming, when copyrights are not.
Copyrights restrict the users of software unjustly, but they are not
dangerous to programming.