coordinated compliance efforts addresses the issues of this thread

[Rich Felker]

On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 03:26:06PM +0200, Felipe Contreras wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 3:33 PM, Bradley M. Kuhn <bkuhn at ebb.org> wrote:
> > Felipe Contreras wrote at 00:52 (EDT):
> >> I'm talking about rights. As a user, I don't have any rights, only
> >> privileges granted by the developer.
> >
> > This is where I disagree, in principle.  While you're technically
> > correct that the "rights" of copyright law stay with the copyright
> > holder, the GPL is clearly designed to pass rights and privileges
> > along to each who receives distribution.
> 
> It doesn't matter how the GPL was designed, the GPL doesn't have
> precedence over the law, and the law doesn't allow a software license
> to change the nature of copyright law.

The law does not define rights in any philosophical sense. For those
who believe in rights, they are something that exist prior to the law,
or evolving independently of law, and which law ideally serves to
protect but often instead infringes.

The philosophy behind the GPL, whether you agree or disagree with it,
is that individuals have fundamental rights to tinker, learn, share
their knowledge, use their knowledge, etc. as long as they don't
infringe on others' rights, and that nobody has a right to hoard
knowledge or apply the concepts of property to it.

That's highly paraphrased based on my own interpretation and beliefs
because I don't intend to sound like somebody regurgitating FSF
talking points.

Rich