Matt Asay today springs to the defense of the widows and orphans over at Google and their comprehensive prosecution of the Google Chrome trademark. Google sent a DMCA notice to the developer of ChromePlugins.org, demanding he stop using their logos and a remix of their adorable comic, and the developer was understandably upset. Asay’s enthusiasm for Google’s cause is characteristic of his business-first approach to the Business of Open Source (though one wonders if he’s confused Google’s duty to police its trademarks for his own), but his high-handed tone is uncalled-for and his conclusions, though brief, are rife with oversimplification.
Asay responds to a rather balanced account of the enforcement with a volley of fake quotes attributed to god-knows-who: open source means “open to pilfer trademarks” and is “a stick-in-the-eye to ‘The (IP) Man’” and that all related rights are “up for grabs.” He bids the unidentified “some” people espousing these non-quotes, “pay attention… you’re wrong.”
The substance of Asay’s argument is a familiar truism: open source copyright licenses are instruments of copyright law. And as he says, “without copyright there is no copyleft.” But the implication that free and open source software depends upon copyright law (and this must be the implication or there is no point at all) is wrong (and doubly wrong because he italicizes it). Were copyright abolished and the default reset to “no rights reserved,” it would be a trivial matter indeed to allow others to modify my source code — I wouldn’t even need a license, because I would have no right to exclude. It’s true that under a no-copyright regime, copyleft would break — I couldn’t use my right to exclude to compel others to make available source code they build on top of mine. But copyleft was devised in response to copyright, not in affirmation of it. In the GNU Manifesto which launched GNU and eventually the FSF, rms’s stated goal was to combat the increasing proprietarization of software. If software could not be made proprietary, copyleft may have been unnecessary. Of course, a company could still attain a sort of de facto proprietarization by controlling access to their source, but this would be much less effective under a system that didn’t punish reverse engineering or the use of decompiled or leaked source code.
Maybe abolition of copyright isn’t the answer, but copyright (much less in its present captive state) is certainly not the only means to software freedom. And the mere existense of exclusive rights, even if similar rights are used to beneficial ends, is no justification for anti-social behavior, whether Google’s or Asay’s.
