Re: Drop the Copyright Assignment requirement for Emacs

[Arthur Miller]

<address@hidden> writes:

> On Tue, May 19, 2020 at 07:26:10AM +0200, Philippe Vaucher wrote:
>> > (and I do note you'd still have to go through the horrors of finding a
>> > pen and paper in your office and manually using your arms to hold
>> > it up to the webcam)
>> 
>> Please, I said 3 times already that YOU JUST TYPE YOUR NAME ON YOUR
>> KEYBOARD, or attach an image. Yes, that's how I did in in Adobe Sign
>> (just typed "Philippe Vaucher" on my keyboard). The only thing it did
>> is the name was displayed using a hand-written font. Surely this
>> cannot be complicated to duplicate. I already said all this.
>
> But anyone can type your name on her keyboard. I can type it. Am
> I now signing something for you? Is it valid before court?
>
> That's the "interesting" problem. Yelling doesn't solve it :)
>
> Now you'd say that I could forge your signature on paper and send
> it in, but traditional trust into something like that is a tad
> higher, and I see two reasons for that: (a) it is more difficult
> to get hold of a physical signature of yours to do the forging,
> and (b) there is significantly more expertise in place to detect
> forged signatures.
>
> Now PGP/GPG might be a technically perfect solution to the problem,
> but effective deployment has been hindered, not last by entities
> hoping to make quick cash of that and seeing a free solution
> threatening their pie-in-the-sky business plans.
>
> The situation is what it is, alas.
>
>> Sorry for yelling but maybe with caps it's more clear.
>
> Nevermind, but I think you're still missing the point: at the
> moment the FSF ends before court over some copyright spat (and
> there have been high-profile ones, they can be hellishly
> expensive, see [1] if you think you've got some time to kill),
> at this moment the FSF will have to prove that it has done its
> due diligence... and no, Someone (TM) at the other end of an
> HTTPS connection saying "yeah, sure, it's me" probably won't
> cut it.
>
> Solutions [2] welcome. Especially if they aren't spiked all over
> with Surveillance Capitalism :-)
>
> Cheers
>
> [1] 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group%2C_Inc._v._International_Business_Machines_Corp.
> [2] Sometimes I dream of decentralized FSF "delegates", one
>    in each small village, who can sign someone's public GPG
>    key. Then I wake up and realize that I'm re-inventing the
>    web of trust, and I hear "PGP? But that's really hard",
>    and keep wondering where that sick meme comes from. Sigh.
>
> -- tomás
>
> -- tomás

Could the problem be attacked from some other angle? It is about
defending in court room? What do you defend in court room? Copyright
(stolen code), patent (stolen idea) and licence (stolen right to use the
code)? Or do I missunderstand?

If someone steel code from some other place, and some company sues for
copyright infrigement, that can equally well happen with current signed
process? Can't it? Some random Joe can send in their paperwork, get
through the process and still send in some code that infringes on
someones copyright. I don't see how is current paperwork a guarantee
against code theft. Patent and licence infrigement are probably
analogus, so I don't think you have a guarantee that this will not
happen even with current process in-place. Yes, FSF has done what it can
to ask you to assure you aren't doing shady stuff, but that can be asked
even without paperwork in some simpler way. No other FOSS projects have
this kind of collaboration demand, are they wrong or bad, I don't know,
but many of them has existed for a blink of time compared to Emacs and
have yet surpassed Emacs in term of users, collaboration etc. I believe
that more users means more developers which means more development and
(maybe) better software.

What about stealth the other way around; if somebody does not take it
and not give back the source code? Does FSF really need to have the
copyright assigned to itself in order to defend someones GPL code? Or
could that assignment happen on case-by-case basis when the situation arises?