Copyright is an unnatural, and unethical enclosure of the public domain.

Copyright is unethical. Copyleft nullifies copyright. Copyleft doesn’t make copyright ethical, it removes its unethical privilege.

Please don’t get carried away and create copyfarleft that punches a hole into the private domain.

The fact that copyright polices the private domain does not demonstrate that policing the private domain is actually ethical in the first place.

Hesitate before you cross that threshold.

I haven’t thought enough to have a strong position on the DB directive stuff. In a principled sense, I think we are in complete agreement. In the email you link to, I was speaking about tactics.

Arguing for a strong copyleft by arguing for strong copyleft may put us at a net loss in terms of freedom. We need to consider this potential and weight it against the benefits we think we’ll achieve. We might, for example, be able to make very strong copyleft for novel interfaces in GNOME by arguing for interface IP (copyright?). Apple attempted to do just this in the past. I think it would have been a mistake to join their side because the result will be a net loss of freedom for software designers and users.

If we’re fighting on the side or arguing for a plan created by people who want to restrict freedoms in ways that we find dystopic, we need to think hard about what the effect of those actions will be.

I don’t claim to know enough about any of the particulars in the DB directive. My only claim the email you linked to was that John Wilbanks, who knows quite a bit and is *definitely* on our side, seemed to have used the logic I described (more an ecosystem view) to come to a very different conclusion than Rufus (who seems to be reacting against particular imagined cases of enclosure).

I have no opinion about this issue in question yet. I do have a strong opinion on how the decision should be made in our community: strategically.

Keeping something secret that nobody wants to know doesn’t really imply artificial scarcity to me. It’s only when you exert effort and resources to keeping a secret secret that I think it makes sense to talk about artificial scarcity.

I think it’s very useful to talk about artificial scarcity because it has strong negative connotations. It puts the burden of justification on those that would act to create it — a necessary first step to any sane IP policy (IMHO).