[ANNOUNCE] LinuxSA Sep (Extra) 2006 Meeting - Swedish Pirate Party

[Egil Möller]

I am sad to hear that informing LinuxSA members of the current european
political tendensies and how they might affect Free Software development
in Europe aswell as about what lots of Europeans (esp. Swedes) thinks
about current copyright law and how it should be reformed, has offended
anyone badly enought for them to want to dissasociate with the LinuxSA
group.

I appologize to the rest of the LinuxSA for creating all this fuzz.

I also want to make a few points:

* I DO NOT endorse braking the current law by "pirating" copyrighted
material.

* I DO think that we need to put an end to privacy invasive laws.

* I DO think that current copyright laws needs reform, and not in the
direction of DMCA and the like. It needs to go back to its original
intent: to provide a _limited_ monopoly for authors to reproduce a work
to stimulate creation of new works that will _eventually_ enter the
public domain.

* I DO think that given current copyright law, publishing and using
software under a copyleft license like the GPL is the ethical thing to do.


An interresting aspect that I hadn't realized before James interviewed
me today is that the arguments against a reformed copyright law with a
shorter copyright term are very very similar to the arguments against
FOSS used by traditional proprietary software vendors...

Also worth noting might be the four freedoms of the GPL. I guess much of
this comes down to if you think the GPL is just a handy legal contract
to govern a certain practical and cheap software development model, or
if you actually believe that these freedoms are important from an
ethical point of view.

prototype at gmail.com wrote:
> I disagree with this what this group is trying to do and the links
> they have to other groups. Moreso I disagree with the fact LinuxSA is
> providing a public platform for them.
> 
> As such I'm unsubscribing from the LinuxSA list in protest.