[Fsf-Debian] user freedom also matters for cultural and opinion works [was: Re: Silent here]

Bryan Baldwin bryan at katofiad.co.nz
Mon Nov 26 08:44:29 UTC 2012


I think that you are reading too much into what copyright licenses can
do for you, or possibly mixing up the inspiration one gains from such
works with the direct modification of them. For instance, I can draft
art images in the style of Frank Frazetta, and make the figures,
animals, and monsters very much like his work. But those images are my
expressions and not litigious under copyright. If it was otherwise,
Frank Cho might have gotten himself into some trouble already.

I think remixes of art are fine, but I don't like making them myself.
And they are not a necessary freedom. There is no dystopic control that
could be forced on anyone by not being allowed to mix such works, and
mixing occurs in spite of the fact that the materials they are derived
from are not usually licensed with permission to modify. If you really
had to make a collage style piece, but were prevented from sourcing
other artist's works, it isn't too much work for you to make your own
samples and piece them together. This is simply not something you can do
with anything but the most trivial program unless you had Stallman and
his a cadre of programmers writing a UNIX replacement. And that was only
done once with some help from Mr. Torvalds.

Artistic remixing isn't even the case in question. Debian isn't being
stampeded with mixed media artists clamouring to get access to all the
free samples of work only to find...oh darn, they are all in invariant
clauses of GFDL docs. Works of opinion and personal views in the
author's own words shouldn't be modified by third parties because they
should remain in the author's own words. Users are already fully free
without permission to modify those.



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