FSF condemns partnership between Mozilla and Adobe to support Digital Restrictions Management

[Zenaan Harkness]

On 5/20/14, Celejar <celejar at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 20 May 2014 21:47:57 +1000
> Zenaan Harkness <zen at freedbms.net> wrote:
>> On 5/20/14, Celejar <celejar at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > On Sat, 17 May 2014 21:40:56 +1000
>> > Zenaan Harkness <zen at freedbms.net> wrote:
>> >> On 5/17/14, Slavko <linux at slavino.sk> wrote:
>> > ...
>> >> > Don't forget, that justice is not when all criminals are imprisoned
>> >> > and/or punished, but when no one blameless is persecuted.
>> >>
>> >> Very eloquent and beautiful words.
>> >> Thank you Slavko.
>> >
>> > But this is precisely the problem with some of the dogmatic idealists
>> > here - by this logic, we should abolish criminal justice entirely, as
>> > it's virtually impossible to guarantee that "no one blameless" will
>> > ever be "persecuted":
>> > http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/guilty.htm
>>
>> I don't remember reading the words Slavko posted before, but the way I
>> read it is as:
>> "we must make our best efforts to not persecute blameless people" and
>> "if blameless people are being persecuted, we must make more efforts
>> [eg with our criminal justice system - to fix this problem]".
>>
>> So not abolish criminal justice, but make more efforts in this system
>> to reduce/minimize persecution/punishment of people who should not be
>> punished.
>>
>> Of course perfection cannot be achieved in reality, I agree.
>
> Of course. But while it's certainly not a zero-sum game, there's
> generally going to be a trade-off: increasing protections for
> defendants will save some innocents, at the expense of letting some
> guilty go free.

Whether that's true or not does not take away from my position that we
ought make efforts in our criminal justice system to 'do the right
thing'.


> The same goes for IP regulation: many of us at least
> believe that the law should balance the rights of the IP holders with
> the rights of the consumer, and insisting on absolute freedom for the
> consumer at the expense of the rights of the rights-holders is wrong.

I'm not sure if that is a straw man, but it's not something I ever said.

In fact, as you well know, GPL relies on copyright law and attempts to
balance the rights of the community with the "rights of the
rights-holders under statute law" in a way which, evidently, many many
people agree with (since they choose the GPL for their code) - and,
the statute law is used to achieve this balance. I believe RMS is
quite pro-copyright law in this regard, although on the surface people
mostly don't realise that.

Regards
Zenaan