On Wed, 30 Mar 2005, Michael Gale wrote: > Besides I am not sure where you are going with this ? Are you saying > that the content on the web page if pirated so I should not view it ?
That's debatable, but you *definitely* shouldn't publicize it. > Information should be free, I believe all books and information > resources should be free. > > As in free beer :) That's fine, as long as the author of the work in question agrees. In many cases, especially with open source systems like Perl, the work in question *will* be freely available with the author's blessing -- usually right on their own web site. But if the material in question is being republished somewhere else without the author's consent -- typically from a jurisdiction with lax copyright law enforcement -- then that's *definitely* not right. The word "theft" may be overused by the strict copyright camp, but in this case, it pretty clearly applies. It was taken from the author without consent or compensation and provided to others in a way that was in most cases explicitly not permitted. That's stealing. Without a proper respect for & understanding of copyright, free software licenses wouldn't be possible. It's useful to understand the difference between, say, the GPL -- which uses copyright provisions to mandate that the material should be made available to all -- and materials in the public domain -- which aren't governed by much of anything and there is no protection of the right to share the material. Being dismissive of all this is not a good habit for open source users. Not that I see why this came up in the first place... -- Chris Devers -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
