IP Alliance says that encouraging free/open source makes you an enemy of the USA
The US-based International Intellectual Property Alliance has asked the US Trade Rep to add Indonesia to its list of rogue nations that don't respect copyright. What did Indonesia do to warrant inclusion on this "301 list"? Its government had the temerity to advise its ministries to give preference to free/open source software because it will cost less and reduce the use of pirated proprietary software in government. According to the IPA, this movement to reduce copyright infringement is actually bad for copyright, because "it fails to build respect for intellectual property rights and also limits the ability of government or public-sector customers (e.g., State-owned enterprise) to choose the best solutions."
This is like crack dealers campaigning against having a laugh with friends because happiness reduces the need for intoxicants. This is like... well, it's like a bunch of fat-cat scumbags behaving so shamefully that you want to smack them.
Let's forget that the statement ignores the fact that there are plenty of businesses built on the OSS model (RedHat, Wordpress, Canonical for starters). But beyond that, it seems astonishing to me that anyone should imply that simply recommending open source products - products that can be more easily tailored without infringing licensing rules - "undermines" anything.
In fact, IP enforcement is often even more strict in the open source community, and those who infringe licenses or fail to give appropriate credit are often pilloried.
If you're looking at this agog, you should be. It's ludicrous.
But the IIPA and USTR have form here: in recent years they have put Canada on the priority watchlist.
Wow, just wow. And please don't miss angusm's comment over there. Since it's too good not to quote:
angusm wrote:The idea that anything can or should be free is a pernicious falsehood that threatens to undermine our whole way of life. If we let people have software for free, soon they'll start believing that other things - air, water, sunlight etc. - should also be free. In the 1960s, we knew what to call that kind of thinking and we called it Communism. Then, as now, the only thing standing in the way of a Communist victory was our willingness to fight them on the battlefields of South-East Asia.
We at the IIPA recognize that not all those involved in the open-source movement are necessarily malicious, but they are nonetheless tampering with forces beyond their control and setting a terrible precedent.
Our motto: "Keeping you free by making sure that nothing else is."
Yep, that's from a human being on our planet alright. Some people are sadly lost, more than it can be expected until you actually see it...
or proclaim users of open source are the enemy of USA.