coordinated compliance efforts addresses the issues of this thread

[Felipe Contreras]

On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 6:24 PM, Rich Felker <dalias at aerifal.cx> wrote:
> 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.

True rights are protected by law, if the law doesn't protect them,
then they are not rights. You can't impose your views of what
constitutes a right to other people, that's the whole reason we have a
common law in the first place.

-- 
Felipe Contreras