Well, seems we agree on all the fundamentals (and I don't think I'm
actually more optimistic than you). I accept all you just wrote. I very
much acknowledge (as does Dan Ariely, incidentally) that tons of
corruption comes from just the design of systems even absent human
temptations; game theory etc.
I happen to be highly critical of the entire institution of copyrights
and patents. My starting point for planning a fantasy world around this
would be (A) abolish copyright and patent laws (B) prohibit DRM and (C)
mandate source release for all *published* works. But this is quite
tangential to writing a copyright license that takes us as far as as we
can within today's system.
I think copyright licenses that cannot be applied to corporate entities
and only to natural people are likely to just set up a hard wall between
worlds. In principle, the employees could make use of such a license,
but I'm more optimistic about copyleft-next getting accepted within such
businesses than I am about discriminatory licenses.
On 2020-01-08 8:46 a.m., Giacomo Tesio wrote:
On 08/01/2020, Aaron Wolf <wolftune(a)riseup.net> wrote:
> Businesses aren't necessarily all sharks.
While I sympathize with your optimism I'm afraid that exceptions are irrelevant.
Corporation are organization made of humans but operating on different
dimensions than humans: as they grow, each person progressively
becomes as relevant as a single cell to your whole body.
We can define them "evil" only if we judge them by human standards
(which is pointless) and from a human perspective.
They simply adapt to the (legal/political/economical) environment.
(also, I was following Kuhn depiction of aggressive copyleft's
violation seekers that build a business model out of their customers'
lawyers' fears :-D).
> My favorite quote: "It is easier to avoid temptation than resist it" -
> Dan Ariely
Not bad, but it's not a matter of temptation: it's survival of the
fittest into an highly competitive system designed to maximize wealth
concentration.
Surely, it's a matter of "Communion": how can we protect what we want
to keep in common (from latin "cum munis", mutually obliged) from "the
tragedies of the garbage" (a more proper depiction Hardin's famous
essay)?
> Without being aggressive to *start* with, when a situation arises and
> loopholes are noticed, businesses leaders will be *tempted* to take
> advantage of them (and usually will indulge). Initially well-intended
> actors end up corrupt.
Exactly.
The point is how turning a copyleft (a form of _protection_ that keep
software _evolution_ in the commons) to a permissive license (a form
of _permission_ that allows privatization) is going to benefit the
community that is defined around the software itself.
> If you discriminate about the entities that can use a license, then you
> remove this avoid-temptation tool for a set of entities and set up
> barriers to cooperation
This appears as a good objection as long as you consider that all
entities that _could_ use a licensed work (and thus accept the
license) are actually constituted by humans.
So practically speaking such humans would be unrestricted to do
anything as long as they (equally) follows the conditions.
So there is no practical barrier to any human nor to their collaboration.
What if organizations cannot become copyright holders of derivative works?
You break a fundamental assumption that give them a reason to compete
through knowledge lock-in and privatization.
Giacomo