[Upd-discuss] French Judge refuses to shut down internet connections of P2P users

[Richard Stallman]

    > I suppose the question is this, if you can authorize something do you
    > have the right to do the thing you are authorizing or merely to prevent
    > others from doing it?

    Authorizing implies authority. Prohibiting too. 

Authorizing implies authority, which implies the power to impede some
kinds of use; but it doesn't necessary imply complete authority to
prohibit any and all kinds of use.  So there is a difference in shade
of meaning, and it can translate into a difference in the amount of
power.

    My comprehension of copyright is based on ownership, which is not negative 
    but simply nihillistic: since its basic rule is that nothing can be known 
    by others, copyright was invented so that knowledge can be owned, to make a 
    profit out of sharable intellectual resources.

I think your idea of copyright has been influenced to a large degree
by the recently-popularized term "intellectual property".  This term
suggests an absolutist and impractical approach to copyright, which
was foreign to previous thinking about copyright in the US.  So you
might want to excise term and its presuppositions from your thinking.

See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.xhtml.