[Upd-discuss] Paper:"Digital property" By Sabine Nuss, NY, NY, April 12-14, 2002

[Richard M. Stallman]

Totally aside from the article's conclusions, which I have not yet
read and have no opinion about, it starts with a serious confusion:
applying the name "copyleft" to something which is not copyleft.

Copyleft does not mean the freedom to redistribute copies.  The name
refers to a specific kind of license condition, which permits modified
versions but only under the same license.

Can you please forward this to the lists
lib-info-society@yahoogroups.com, lib-plic@yahoogroups.com, and
rekombinant@liste.rekombinant.org, since I am not on them?  And can
you please find me a way to contact Sabine Nuss, so I can ask her
to add this correction in a footnote?

The article also tries to treat copyright and patents as a single
issue, using the term "intellectual property" to refer to both.  This
tends to carry bias and confusion; for more explanation about this, see
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.xhtml.

It also refers to the popular version of the GNU system as "Linux".

It is ironic that a Marxist would share the propensity of Capitalists
to view these issues primarily in terms of their economic effects.  In
effect, they put their basic values in the same limited subspace, and
disagree only in which directions they consider positive and which
they consider negative.