The Death of D. (Was Tango vs Phobos)

[Mike Parker]

Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 06:58:13PM +0100, Jb wrote:
>> I think the mistake you and Yigal are making is assuming that it should all 
>> be done in the same way.
> 
> My own position is may be a little weird. As far as rights to information
> goes, there are a two:
> 
> 1) You cannot force someone to divulge anything.
> 
> Thus, he is free to charge someone for a piece of information if he wants.
> 
> 2) You cannot force someone /not/ to divulge something.
> 
> Thus, once you tell someone something, he is free to resell it if he wants.
> 
> In short, I'm saying a person can choose to tell or not tell whatever he
> wants.
> 
> 
> We are definitely in agreement on point #1. Copyright directly restricts
> point #2 - it forces people to not divulge something they know, lest they
> face undesirable consequences.

Copyright has no relevance to the spread of information. That's what 
NDAs and opaque governments are for. You are absolutely free to divulge 
anything and everything you know about copyrighted material. You just 
can't copy if for distribution. Go ahead, write an essay describing the 
inner workings of the copyrighted software you've reverse engineered so 
that others can recreate it. You'll violate no copyright by doing so 
(and no need to mention the DMCA -- that's nothing to do with copyright 
and everything to do with corporate bottom lines). That's information 
and you are at total liberty to spread it as you see fit. The software 
itself is *not* information.