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Pirate Party: Copyright reform poses no threat to GPL
Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, voiced his opinion on Sunday 26th of July 2009 regarding the aim of the Pirate Party to make software copyright expire after a certain period of time. According to Stallman, it would be particularly harmful that free code could be used in proprietary software without the benefits of GPL being transferred to the new program. In reality, the harm is directed this applies to so few cases that there is no sensible reason to write a special law based on these incidents.
The Finnish Pirate Party is lobbying for a copyright term of 5 to 10 years, an excruciatingly long time in the software world. Few people use software from 10 years ago, and the use of 5-year-old software is limited at best. Actively maintained software receives updates periodically in its lifetime. New versions are published and the copyright starts over for each of them. In these cases, earlier versions do become free with age, but few software developers are interested in old versions instead of the new, fixed and improved ones.
"Richard Stallman has participated actively in the discussion board mailing list of the international Pirate Parties, and he has presented good viewpoints. The question here is more about grasping onto details. Stallman supports many of the goals of the Pirate Party" - Pasi Palmulehto, The leader of Pirate Party Finland
GPL is a license which, instead of restrictions, aims to bring more freedom to the software industry. In his article, Stallman proposes creating a code bank from which source code would be released to public use after the copyright has expired. GPL is compatible with many of the stances of The Pirate Party. However, forming this kind of a database, maintaining it, monitoring it, and making sure that all source code is gathered to and released from it is not a realistic objective.
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