Python, the programming language in which reddit is written, is Copyright © 1990-2006, Python Software Foundation. The components of reddit's python code, such as the CherryPy WSGI components, are Copyright (c) 2004-2007, CherryPy Team and others.
Lighttpd, the web server used by reddit's servers, is Copyright (c) 2004, Jan Kneschke.
The project management and bug tracking software for Lighttpd (and CherryPy) is Trac, Copyright © 2003-2006 Edgewall Software.
Much of the more popular content (xkcd, newspapers, other sites) are also under various copyrights and accompanying licences.
So much for the official stance.
Now, unofficially and despite the widespread preference for copyrighted material (see the "more popular content" statement above) there seems to be broad support among the reddit user base to actually abolish copyright, as exemplified in a recent top-rated link Why you SHOULD be a pirate. The discussion even invaded the apolitical sanctity of my beloved programming subreddit in the form of the link Copyright infringement is not theft. In both discussions, there seems to be quite widespread support for getting rid of copyright.
I find this quite ironic given the nature of reddit as a copyrighted product, its base of copyrighted software, and particularly the interest in the form of upvotes of all sorts of copyrighted material. Perhaps the same anti-copyright discussion could be had on a completely public domain message board somewhere, but I am not aware of any internet-capable public domain operating systems. I encourage those among the redditor crowd who believe strongly in their anti-copyright stance to produce a public domain software stack upon which to discuss this topic and with which to distribute their public domain art, music, and film.
I would join them in contributing software and photography, the latter of mine of which primarily ends up in the Wikimedia Commons under a ShareAlike license, but I am certainly willing to put my code and photographs where my mouth is. I wonder if any of the redditors who so strongly support the anti-copyright movement would really do the same?
Further irony: the majority of Gnutella and BitTorrent clients are copyrighted software (several even completely proprietary). The famous Pirate Party of Sweden goes the step of clearly marking their internet content No copyright, Piratpartiet, 2006–2007, but something interesting happens when you connect to their web server:
sam@sol:~/projects/erlang/sway$ telnet www2.piratpartiet.se 80
Trying 217.198.145.137...
Connected to kaukbacken.homelinux.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www2.piratpartiet.se
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2007 20:06:13 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.1-pl3-gentoo
You guessed it. Apache, PHP, and Gentoo (a Linux distribution)? All copyrighted software.
I welcome our new public domain overlords. Copyright is dead. Long live the public domain. It would be nice to see proponents of the anti-copyright movement eat their own cooking, though, and to take at least a few moments to notice the hypocrisy and irony of the situation when they do not.
Draconian DRM and the seemingly limitless extensions on the duration of copyright are an issue. Copyright itself is a good. To verify this, simply check the "Help -> About" menu of your browser for its copyright information.
5 comments:
Yes, it is true that most tools we (The Pirate Party) use are copyrighted one way or the other. Some through GPL, some through traditional commercial copyright. Our external systems are open source, our internal systems are Microsoft .Net based.
That doesn't prevent us from using those tools to change the way the world works, though. And what we produce ourselves is free of copyright - as far as the law allows (you can't waive your right to credit/attribution in some jurisdictions).
We choose our tools from our needs, rather than from the specific legality surrounding them. After all, we are intending to change copyright totally anyway. We choose the best available tools today to get there tomorrow.
/ Rick (pp)
Thanks for your very clear and insightful response, Rick. The PP is one of the few organisations I can respect for its stance, if for no other reason than its open embrace of the public policy aspect of its stance on copyright. This stands in quite large contrast to the millions of people who prefer to be as quiet as possible about their copyright-related activities, revealing their true intention: to personally gain as much as they can from ignoring copyright without getting caught.
If the public truly wants copyright laws to change, then copyright should be broken in full public view, "on the courthouse steps" if you will, not in the darkness and security of the pseudo-anonymity of one's encrypted file sharing network. There's a reason than being called "sneaky" is a sort of underhanded compliment at best.
-Sam
"I wonder if any of the redditors who so strongly support the anti-copyright movement would really do the same?"
With the exception of a single chunk of GPLed Perl, pretty much all of the prose, poetry, and code I've put on the web to date is released to the public domain.
Good stuff Brennen. I would be very happy indeed to see a thriving public domain software community. With multiple UNIX-alike operating systems under the two "main" licenses (BSD and GPL) I wonder when there will be a widely-accepted and participated project for a public domain operating system, or if such a thing is even possible in today's copyright, license, and particularly patent climate. Would it be possible to write an operating system for modern hardware without using *any* patents or copyrighted information whatsoever?
I guess it's not an uninteresting question, but for myself I'm not actively opposed to tools like the GPL. In the context of an ever-stronger copyright regime, I think they've been a useful forking of extant law and custom. Fighting fire with fire and all that.
I haven't, to date, found much incentive to place my work under the strictures of the GPL, but I don't have major ethical or pragmatic issues with the framework it provides. Nor would I necessarily turn down (for example) a chance to publish copyrighted writing for real money, at least given a reasonable set of licensing and re-use options.
Placing my work in the public domain is for me a simple statement of my view on the shared (if not consensual) fictions of IP law, as well as a way to ensure that people can use it, period. A software community with the same goals might be interesting, but I don't see it solving any important problems that aren't addressed by existing licensing schemes. I could be wrong, but I don't think that people use the GPL, BSD, Artistic, et al. because they believe in strong copyright - I think they do so because those licenses have provided a kind of safe harbor in a world afflicted by strong copyright.
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