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To: Andy Thomas who wrote (20192)	6/24/1998 4:46:00 AM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

>>>Perhaps I too am communist in that I think it should be open. It's as if the DOJ can never fix something which is broken from the start, the copyright laws.<<< Your position is closer to being anarchist than communist. But hey, who cares any more about that? Having participated in some public domain writing projects over the last 20 years, most recently SI, I can say humbly I believe that copyrighted works have much better quality on average. We don't have that many of the idle educated petite nobility left to write books for us for free any more, you know, let alone pay for publishing. As I am an artist, I would be opposed to doing away with copyright there as well. In fact everything I do in my life, both vocations and avocations, falls mostly under either copyright or patent law or both, sometimes for myself, sometimes for a client. Ditto for my wife. I hope to make a living doing these things forever. What would I do for food if your scenario came true, Andy? Are you writing anything I could steal and sell to make a living? That is not to say that the Free Software movement has it all wrong. It's just that this movement is often mistaken for saying that the makers of software should make no profit from their labor, which is far from true. It is a different distribution and development and QA method. Also, you can do OS software and compilers that way, but I would submit not great painting or music or writing. However, I believe the software patent is widely abused, and the details of copyright law and rewards are arcane and obsolete. We do need some new form that combines the two and extends them as so much becomes virtual or methodology/information/algorithm based. We should clear up the matter of genetic patents at the same time. Chaz