@@ -654,100 +654,158 @@ lawyers. Law firms have enough incentive to produce great briefs even
though the stuff they build can be taken and copied by anyone else. The
lawyer is a craftsman; his or her product is public. Yet the crafting is
not charity. Lawyers get paid; the public doesn't demand such work
without price. Instead this economy flourishes, with later work added to
the earlier.
We could imagine a legal practice that was different --- briefs and
arguments that were kept secret; rulings that announced a result but not
the reasoning. Laws that were kept by the police but published to no one
else. Regulation that operated without explaining its rule.
We could imagine this society, but we could not imagine calling it
``free.'' Whether or not the incentives in such a society would be better
or more efficiently allocated, such a society could not be known as free.
The ideals of freedom, of life within a free society, demand more than
efficient application. Instead, openness and transparency are the
constraints within which a legal system gets built, not options to be
added if convenient to the leaders. Life governed by software code should
be no less.
Code writing is not litigation. It is better, richer, more
productive. But the law is an obvious instance of how creativity and
incentives do not depend upon perfect control over the products
created. Like jazz, or novels, or architecture, the law gets built
upon the work that went before. This adding and changing is what
creativity always is. And a free society is one that assures that its
most important resources remain free in just this sense.\footnote{This
quotation is Copyright \copyright{} 2002, Lawrence Lessig. It is
licensed under the terms of
\href{http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/}{the ``Attribution
License'' version 1.0} or any later version as published by Creative
Commons.}
\end{quotation}
In essence, lawyers are paid to service the shared commons of legal
infrastructure. Few citizens defend themselves in court or write their
own briefs (even though they are legally permitted to do so) because
everyone would prefer to have an expert do that job.
The Free Software economy is a market ripe for experts. It
functions similarly to other well established professional fields like the
law. The GPL, in turn, serves as the legal scaffolding that permits the
creation of this vibrant commercial and noncommercial Free Software
economy.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\chapter{A Tale of Two Copyleft Licenses}
While determining the proper methodology and criteria to yield an accurate
count remains difficult, the GPL is generally considered one of the most
widely used Free Software licenses. For most of its history --- for 16 years
from June 1991 to June 2007 --- there was really only one version of the GPL,
version 2.
However, the GPL had both earlier versions before version 2, and, more well
known, a revision to version 3.
\section{Historical Motivations for the General Public License}
The earliest license to grant software freedom was likely the Berkeley
Software Distribution (``BSD'') license. This license is typical of what are
often called lax, highly permissive licenses. Not unlike software in the
public domain, these non-copyleft licenses (usually) grant software freedom
to users, but they do not go to any effort to uphold that software freedom
for users. The so-called ``downstream'' (those who receive the software and
then build new things based on that software) can restrict the software and
distribute further.
The GNU's Not Unix (``GNU'') project, which Richard M.~Stallman (``RMS'')
founded in 1984 to make a complete Unix-compatible operating system
implementation that assured software freedom for all. However, RMS saw that
using a license that gave but did not assure software freedom would be
counter to the goals of the GNU project. RMS invented ``copyleft'' as an
answer to that problem, and began using various copyleft licenses for the
early GNU project programs\footnote{RMS writes more fully about this topic in
his essay entitled simply
\href{http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html}{\textit{The GNU Project}.
For those who want to hear the story in his own voice,
\href{http://audio-video.gnu.org/audio/}{speech recordings} of his talk,
\textit{The Free Software Movement and the GNU/Linux Operating System}
are also widely available}.
\section{Proto-GPLs And Their Impact}
The earliest copyleft licenses were specific to various GNU programs. For
example, \href{http://www.free-soft.org/gpl_history/emacs_gpl.html}{The Emacs
General Public License} was likely the first copyleft license ever
published. Interesting to note that even this earliest copyleft license
contains a version of the well-known GPL copyleft clause:
\begin{quotation}
You may modify your copy or copies of GNU Emacs \ldots provided that you also
\ldots cause the whole of any work that you distribute or publish, that in
whole or in part contains or is a derivative of GNU Emacs or any part
thereof, to be licensed at no charge to all third parties on terms identical
to those contained in this License Agreement.
This simply stated clause is the fundamental innovation of copyleft.
Specifically, copyleft \textit{uses} the copyright holders' controls on
permission to modify the work to add a conditional requirement. Namely,
downstream users may only have permission to modify the work if they pass
along the same permissions on the modified version that came originally to
them.
These original program-specific proto-GPLs give an interesting window into
the central ideas and development of copyleft. In particular, reviewing them
shows how the text of the GPL we know has evolved to address more of the
issues discussed earlier in \S~\ref{software-and-non-copyright}.
\section{The GNU General Public License, Version 1}
\section{The GNU General Public License, Version 2}
\section{The GNU General Public License, Version 3}
\section{The Innovation of Optional ``Or Any Later'' Version}
\section{Complexities of Two Simultaneously Popular Copylefts}
\chapter{GPLv2: Running Software and Verbatim Copying}
\label{run-and-verbatim}
This chapter begins the deep discussion of the details of the terms of
GPLv2\@. In this chapter, we consider the first two sections: GPLv2 \S\S
0--2. These are the straightforward sections of the GPL that define the
simplest rights that the user receives.
\section{GPLv2 \S 0: Freedom to Run}
\label{GPLs0}
\S 0, the opening section of GPLv2, sets forth that the work is governed by
copyright law. It specifically points out that it is the ``copyright
holder'' who decides if a work is licensed under its terms and explains
how the copyright holder might indicate this fact.
A bit more subtly, \S 0 makes an inference that copyright law is the only
system under which it is governed. Specifically, it states:
\begin{quote}
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not
covered by this License; they are outside its scope.
\end{quote}
In essence, the license governs \emph{only} those activities, and all other
activities are unrestricted, provided that no other agreements trump GPLv2
(which they cannot; see Sections~\ref{GPLs6} and~\ref{GPLs7}). This is
very important, because the Free Software community heavily supports
users' rights to ``fair use'' and ``unregulated use'' of copyrighted
material. GPLv2 asserts through this clause that it supports users' rights
to fair and unregulated uses.
Fair use of copyrighted material is an established legal doctrine that
permits certain activities. Discussion of the various types of fair
use activity are beyond the scope of this tutorial. However, one
important example of fair use is the right to quote a very few lines
(less than seven or so) and reuse them as you would with or without
licensing restrictions.