Czech Copyright Bill Undercuts Copyleft, Artists 282
Andorin writes "Earlier this month a copy of a draft of the Czech Republic's new Copyright Act [Czech PDF] was leaked to Pirate News. Included among several disturbing provisions are new regulations for 'public licenses' such as Creative Commons licenses and the GPL/BSD licenses. The amendment essentially requires that an artist wishing to use a public license must notify the administrator of a collecting agency, and must prove that they created the work in question. This goes against one of the strengths of Creative Commons and other licenses, namely the ease with which they can be applied. Additionally, collecting agencies will have increased jurisdiction over copylefted and orphaned works. ZeroPaid covers the story, noting that the amendment also reduces the royalties which artists receive from libraries by 40%, with that money instead going directly to publishers."
Think of the Artists (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't that the rallying cry of the copyright cartels?...
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Sure. The media pigopolists are thinking of the artists. Specifically, how to get more money out of their hands and into the publishing interest's own.
This kind of legalized extortion isn't reflexive, you know. It takes a fair bit of thinking, plus the scruples of a stoat, to invoke the cause of your own victim in support of your victimization.
Re:Think of the Artists (Score:4, Insightful)
Translated more simply:
If you have the money like the MafiAA does, you TOO can buy incredibly asstarded laws to protect your illegal monopoly price-gouging and put those uppity little "artists" back in their rightful slave-labor places in shitty little countries like the Czech... or UK... or USA...
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Well of course. The rules of this game are simple and obvious: 1) Maximize profits 2) justify your means after the fact.
Win the hearts by saying "we protect the little guy" while simultaneously taking for yourself all the value generated by the little guy, and keeping him indentured to you indefinitely. This is nothing new or secret. It happens in plain view of the public all the time.
The public doesn't like to bother checking facts and buys the cor
Re:Think of the Artists (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see how restricting an artists rights to apply whatever license they want to their creation is helping them in the least.
Re:Think of the Artists (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people get paid for the work they do, not the work that they did. If a construction worker wants some more money, he has to build another house. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that if a performing artist wants more money, he should have to execute another performance.
Artists should be paid for live music. In the modern technological landscape, digital copies are no longer the product, but rather the advertisement.
And besides, even if that wasn't true, there is nothing that says an artist has to be an artist. If artists can't make a living being artists, then they can go get a job that pays, just like the rest of us. I see no evidence that this will result in a complete absence of new music, and if it does then the forces of widespread demand will create new opportunities to profit on music.
So your justification of your outdated business model is crap. Music publishing is an anachronism, and you need to stop taking our freedom away, move into the modern era, and get yourself a real job.
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Sure, but what about the recording artists? Should they be left high and dry? Is public performance the only art venue that is deserving of reward?
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Sure, but what about the recording artists? Should they be left high and dry? Is public performance the only art venue that is deserving of reward?
Short version: yes. Long version: More or less. Thanks to autotune, the work done by a recording singer is minimal, and a lot of music can be similarly tuned or fixed by computers.
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Why? Why should artists make money the same way as a builder? Why should artists onl
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Because their record label wants to make money. However, the radio, MTV, myspace, youtube Greatful Dead bootlegs and the like all allow people to listen to music at no cost.
"How does that work?" Somebody funds it. Your favorite band raises money and records an album. Perhaps some philanthropy happens (that's how we got Carnegie hall). Maybe som
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I'm sure everyone would be okay with just "making a copy" of their back accounts and distribute it. Hey free culture right?
Ahhh.... now I get it. Music Publishers confuse money with culture. If it has a dollar sign attached to it, it is culture. If it doesn't, it is worthless and should forcibly have a dollar sign attached to it, so that it becomes culture.
As perverse and mindblowingly stupid as that attitude is, I now understand exactly why and how Entertainment Publishers work and think. Please do everyone a favor and snort that bag of coke you have in your desk all at once.
And by the way, HIPAA exists because people do stupi
Speechless (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm stunned. This has to be the most brutal attack on the idea of free culture to date. We're all accustomed to copyright being made more strict, but actively making it harder to release your works under permissive licensing is a new low.
It's like the copyright lobbyists didn't care about keeping a low profile anymore and shouted "we own your government" from the rooftops.
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It costs more money to hide what they're doing and achieve their goals in secret.
They just realized theres no point in hiding it any more.
Its not like the reality tv addicted people of generation-emo will do anything anyway.
Re:Speechless (Score:5, Insightful)
Us: It's a bad law.
Them: But, it's a law! There must be a good reason! Why do you think about stuff like this!?!
Re:S peechless (Score:2, Informative)
Standard issue in the dysfunctional state of Czechs (according to Wikipedia, of turkic origins, not slavs). Highest prices of every day items in the EU, highest prices of communication services in the EU, highest prices of energy & fuels in the EU. Country ruled by economic mafia for good 20 years, whose biggest thieft and a man with obvious blood on his hands, callous Kalousek, has been voted by Brussel's byrocrats as "the best finance minister in EU." That's not a spit in the eye, that's kung-fu kick
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While the above is probably rightly marked flamebait, there is a truth hidden in the midst of it. Czech policies on some level have been causing massive migration of Romi to France and Italy, sparking off the recent debate over who's allowed to be in what country (despite fairly broad travel agreements under EU treaty).
I believe the issue with the Romi is not the right to travel to France and Italy, but the right to stay there. Similar to the U.S. and people staying here beyond their visa limits.
Re:Speechless (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be interresting if the same laws were to be applied to all copyright licenses. Want to publishing something closed source? "notify the administrator of a collecting agency, and must prove that they created the work in question".
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I'm stunned. This has to be the most brutal attack on the idea of free culture to date.
Er, more like the most brutal (and direct) attack in recent times, or most brutal attack from the copyright lobby sure... I mean, when it was Czechoslovakia and under the Soviets, I think free culture took a worse beating.
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Well yeah, it was basically censorship and suppression of anything that could be construed as anti-Soviet that I was referring to.
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I'm surprised that it took this long, actually. Charity was only legal in the first place because there was no way for charities to significantly compete with for-profit businesses as long as we were talking about goods and services. Data is any entirely different matter, thanks to the negligible cost of duplication and distribution.
If you think large businesses are going to tolerate kindness and generosity when it cuts into their bottom lines, you are in for a long series of rude shocks. Abundance is bad f
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I hopre some people are busy creating art generators with automatic filled out forms to apply to the agency and bury them in it.
If I may offer an alternative viewpoint (Score:2)
The idea of verifying that the media under free licences is actually free is not such a bad idea. It does, as the summary says, cut into one of the strengths of copyleft licences, but on the other hand, it also strengthens the trust in such a licence. I think (IANAL) that at least part of the burden lies with the consumer to confirm that the work they're licensing is actually licensed that way, so the obvious benefit of this system is that we can look at the license, and say with a greater degree of confide
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Excuse me... Free has little to do with price. And in the case of GPL and LGPL, the price is as follows: "If you use the software you have to provide the source and any possible modifications you might have made to the people you sold/gave the software to." That's the price. Whether you view it as worth nothing or priceless all is in whether you're just a user or a developer.
Re:Speechless (Score:5, Insightful)
> Face it. The age of the freetard is over. It's time to pay people what their work is worth. Freeloader.
What if the AUTHOR declares that price to be ZERO.
Why should a Robber Baron Wannabe such as yourself have ANY say in the matter?
This is an assault on the rights of AUTHORS.
People who whine "freetard" should be all over this.
Of course that word doesn't really mean anything.
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Publishers need bread and butter as well
So do horse whip makers. Publishers were very important in the physical media world, but just like horse buggy fitters, their role in a changing world diminishes. CDs are almost dead, DVDs will be following on behind as on demand services replace them, even ereaders are gaining traction, in spite of the ridiculous prices of ebooks. The publishers role will soon be boutique and central portals like itunes. The content creators will be able to cut out the behemoth publi
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Except that if the comment at the bottom of that blog is correct, that's not what has happened. In effect, they increased the artists' royalties by 20% and added an additional publisher royalty equal to 2/3rds of the newly increased author's royalty.
Previous royalty for the author: 0.5 CZK. New royalty 1.0 CZK. Author's part: .6 CZK. Publisher's part: .4 CZK.
But saying that they've increased the author's royal
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Taking things a bit out of context? It's not actively making it harder, it's just making it so that people actually have to show they have a right to license the content that way.
Yet does the same not apply to any creative work?. Should people who use a commercial licence not also have to prove that they have the right to licence it - and that it is not plagiarism?
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I don't see how it needs special casing, i
Re:Speechless (Score:5, Insightful)
Legally speaking, there is no copyleft. It's simply a legal issue of licensing a copyrighted work under a royalty free license. The problem isn't with the copyright, it's with the collection agencies and their mandates. Since they are set up to collect for all the works under their purview, copyleft agreements confuse them.
In the US, ASCAP collects for recordings by Spanish, French, and Outer Mongolian artists - those people never actually see any money since they aren't usually registered with ASCAP, but they do collect. According to ASCAP, it is a violation to not pay for the use of the songs, even if the songs have been released under a royalty free license. The only exemption recognized by the law that allows ASCAP to collect is public domain works - so it's possible that they are correct. That is a flaw in the law creating the collection agencies not the copyright law.
The issue is that the vast majority of the works are used under national Mandatory Licensing regulations. This allows venues to use the works without having to negotiate individual use licenses. Because they are built around the ML, individual licensing agreements aren't considered when calculating royalty payments to the collection agencies. There are 2 approaches to resolving the issue:
Given the vast disparity of volume in "collect" vs "do not collect", the easy solution is to require copyleft works to register. This also has many other advantages for the collection agencies:
Since I can't read the original proposed law, I will give it the benefit of the doubt and say it seems to be a step in the right direction in that it at least codifies the right of an artist to remove their work from the mandatory collection pool without having to deposit the work in the public domain.
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Re:Copyleft does complicate the system (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see how it's fair to demand registration of copyleft and not other copyrighted works. Enforcement of copyright is (and should remain) a private not criminal matter, the government doesn't have to hunt anyone down. I imagine the authors of the work will show up in court if they file infrigement charges.
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Personally, I'm for everyone regardless of license being required to register. If the copyright office can't find the rights holder, then the work should be public domain. Not having a registration requirement makes the "orphaned works" problem much worse.
Re:Copyleft does complicate the system (Score:4, Insightful)
I think there are a lot of details you're probably missing. I'm going from the perspective of American copyright, so it doesn't directly apply. Still, the international laws tend to be fairly similar.
I know I should have used a car analogy. I'm sorry.
Let's say I'm some no-name wanna-be who wrote a song, had my no-name band record a demo, and submitted that demo to a record label (no, this isn't the way it generally works in real life). There are 3 different copyrights involved right there. Even if it's only $30 to register those copyrights to keep the labels from stealing the songs...for many "starving artists," that's a week's worth of food.
The situation's probably even worse for an author trying to get a story published. He's almost definitely going to submit several different versions of several different stories before one gets accepted. If s/he has to register for copyrights on each version, s/he'll wind up shelling out more in copyright fees than comes back in royalties until/unless s/he manages to write enough hits to support him/herself and the family. Who's going to stick with it that long?
The situation gets *really* bad when you get into situations like GPL. Do you have to register each "official" release? What happens when someone tries to register a fork? What if you decide to license the next version of your work as BSD?
Come to think of it, this could have been aimed directly against free software, with Creative Commons just a nice little bit of collateral damage.
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Even if it's only $30 to register those copyrights to keep the labels from stealing the songs...for many "starving artists," that's a week's worth of food.
Why should registration have a fee? It could (and I think these days is, I haven't registered a copyright since 1984) be an online form that's automated. You would need no manpower to impliment it except when there was a fight over ownership of copyright.
The situation gets *really* bad when you get into situations like GPL. Do you have to register each "o
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Are you enough of an expert in Czech Law to tell us for certain that they do not demand registration of other copyrighted materials in some way?
Is it fair to complain about a system if you don't know it very well?
If they adhere to the international treaties that they signed decades ago, then they don't.
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If you are worried about how content creators get paid then you haven't thought about it long enough. Content as a service, that is the new model. If you can't sell your content as a service to customers or businesses then the othe
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A few weeks ago, I read an article about the lack of copyright in Germany in the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. Compared to England - where copyright had been introduced a long time ago - there were significantly more books available at cheaper prices. The authors were paid better, too.
Here it is:
Google Translation [googleusercontent.com] / Original German [spiegel.de]
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Unless it was butchered beyond recognition in the English translation, the article doesn't say that authors were paid better than in England at the time but I guess it is possible.
Here's the part that says that (my quick & dirty translation):
The German knowledge initiative led to a curious stituation which sure enough nobody noticed at this time, though: Sigismund Hermbstädt, a long-forgotten professor of chemistry and pharmacy from Berlin, earned a higher royalty with his work "Fundamentals of Leather Work" than the British author Mary Shelley with her famous horror novel "Frankenstein"
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Re:Copyleft does complicate the system (Score:5, Interesting)
Except that the actual truth is on the exact opposite side of the spectrum.
Fashion industry [nytimes.com] shows how profitable it is [ssrn.com], especially compared to most other industries, and in Fashion industry there are no copyrights or patents. Sure there are trademarks, but no copyrights or patents at all, and they are highly creative and profitable, thus proving your position inconsistent with reality.
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The best example of the lack of copyright is the fashion industry. There is no copyright. Everything you can see on the street or in the store you can copy free and sell it. But are we lacking of fashion? Hell no, the fashion industry is the most creative industry and there are no shortcomings of profits either. Don't believe me: http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html [ted.com]
Only 5% of all book authors and musicians are actually making money off of copyright. At least 95%
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So let's say you write a novel or a symphony. That's a lot of work. Without copyright at all, anybody can take what you wrote, do the equivalent of photocopying it, and make a big pile of cash off of your work without paying you a dime. The ways anything artistic gets created in a world without copyright are patronage systems (e.g. writers and poets in the service of a monarch), folk art (generally not written down until the 18th century or so), or hobbyists (often nobility) who have the spare time to write
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Copyright still serves a purpose in our society. Let's say I produce a great book, something along the lines of the next Harry Potter. Should a movie studio be able to just take my book and make it into a movie without my permission? Of course not. I should be able to sell the movie rights to whichever studio I wish (or no studio at all).
Of course, the lengths that copyright lasts for these days are ridiculous also. It's very unlikely that my hypothetical "hot new book" will be making me anything but t
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Fashion industry proves everybody wrong on this issue, it has no copyright or patent protection (they do have trademarks) and their industry is much more creative and much more profitable than most other (non resource mining) industries.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=878401 [ssrn.com]
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You may be moderated as a Flamebait for this comment [slashdot.org].
What's funny is just how sane the position [slashdot.org] is and how it receives wide range of responses.
Yes, copyrights and patents need to be abolished.
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To see why this is too good to be true, try actually restricting yourself freely distributed media, and derivative works thereon. The rapid influx of new works belies the creative stagnation behind them. By the time you've watched the 5th
copyleft is simple (Score:4, Insightful)
Or treat copyleft as a license, a form of contract. And settle disputes in a court, presenting evidence that the license was applied to an original creation. Which is how it manages to survive in the rest of Europe.
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Why? (Score:2)
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enforcement of copyleft could become extremely difficult at some point for the government. The government cannot take for granted that you just post some code or a media file, slap a CC license on it and you had every right to do that.
How is that ANY different from proprietary copyright?? I will rewrite that for you:
enforcement of copyright could become extremely difficult at some point for the government. The government cannot take for granted that you just post some code or a media file, slap a proprietary license on it and you had every right to do that.
In fact, proprietary makes it HARDER to enforce since no-one can see the code and say "Hey! I wrote that! You stole it!"
Also, since when does the government enforce copyleft? Enforcement is a civil matter that is left up to the rights-holders.
Mods, please tell me again why this ignorant comment is modded up?
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Their solution is wrong. The easiest way to solve it would be to pass a law which requires Copyleft to be stated, in writing in a copyright office application.
Easiest for that government, perhaps, but quite frankly I don't give a rat's ass. The Berne Convention says that everything I write, including this post, is copyright to me - automatically. I can't imagine a single legitimate reason why I should have to specifically register my writings in order to distribute them with a Copyleft license, when I have to do no such thing to distribute them with a proprietary license.
Your suggested handling of proprietary licences: "Hey, MikeRT! I wrote this. Want to read it?
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The government cannot take for granted that you just post some code or a media file, slap a CC license on it and you had every right to do that.
And why not? Unless there is evidence to the contrary, I think there is no problem believing such claims. Putting the burden of proof on the creator stifles creativity. Do I have to take a photo of me in front of my PC to prove that I wrote this comment?
Reality Czech (Score:3, Insightful)
The government cannot take for granted that you just post some code or a media file, slap a CC license on it and you had every right to do that. As people reuse it and modify it, if it goes to trial, the government has to hunt down the entire chain back to the original content in order to respect due process rights.
Try this:
"The government cannot take for granted that you just post some code or a media file, slap a proprietary license on it and you had every right to do that. As people reuse it and modify it, if it goes to trial, the government has to hunt down the entire chain back to the original content in order to respect due process rights."
In other words, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that intellectual property rights in general are not bought and sold and pass through tons of hands. Witness the e
Current law isn't much better either (Score:4, Informative)
Currently the Czech law requires you to pay royalties to collecting agencies regardless of the fact that you are not a member of any such agency and therefore will never get any money of them back.
It doesn't matter that you are only playing music composed by you, you are still obliged to pay.
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And how is this any different from, say, ASCAP, who demands that you pay a license fee because you potentially could [techdirt.com] sing songs to which they have grabbed the rights.
Still just a draft (Score:3, Insightful)
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Depends on who ponies up the cash to pay off the right people. The Czech Republic has some of the highest rates of corruption in the OECD according to wikipedia. Take it with a grain of salt.
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The Czech minister of culture denied that the text is not actually authentic in recent interview (http://www.ceskatelevize.cz/ivysilani/210411058080819-hyde-park-ct24/) on CT24 (state-run news channel). He also promised that if there was such a law in the making, there would be a wide public discussion about it.
My opinion is he's being dishonest at best. Consider this: when the Czech Pirate Party asked the Czech Ministry of Culture for the draft, the ministry flatly refused to given them any information. No
Waiting... (Score:5, Funny)
VIolation of the Berne Convention (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't this a violation of the Berne Convention?
According to Wikipedia:
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Exactly what I was wondering, is Czech Republic leaving WTO?
Re:VIolation of the Berne Convention (Score:5, Funny)
Appears that is correct; this draft is not compatible with the Berne Convention.
Of course, it is only a leaked draft, not even a public document, so it has likely not been subjected to normal sanity checks, or by normal, sane Czechs.
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"to normal sanity checks, or by normal, sane Czechs."
I see what you did there :D
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The registration is required in order to prevent the collecting societies from collecting royalties on your behalf.
Thank you for the explanation; that's quite different from what the EDRI-gram and Slashdot articles make it look like, and actually similar to what we have in a few other countries (maybe someone can mod you informative). Then the points I made in my earlier comment below become irrelevant in this case.
I'm opposed to the system of collecting societies too, but I'm also living with it, and I don't see that it makes much of a difference with respect to the creation and distribution of publicly licensed works.
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Indeed it seems so, and the draft creates confusion with respect to the rights of foreign authors. From the EDRI-gram article:
Leaving the issue of what "the strict copyright framework" actually covers aside, the draft appearantly imposes this obligation on "authors" rather than "distributors", meaning that a foreign author can technically be subject to Czec
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According to Wikipedia, the Czech Republic is a party to the Berne Convention [wikipedia.org]. So it's possible the courts could stop this.
Prove it? (Score:2)
How do I prove that I created something? When I write something in Wikipedia, do I have to notify the Czech authorities of every update?
A little clarification (Score:2, Interesting)
It has a very good chance of passage... (Score:4, Interesting)
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The reason: this is still not a full democracy in the Western sense. Corruption is still rampant.
Come visit California. I'll bet our political filth creatures, blindfolded and hogtied, can out corrupt yours. I'll even spot your side $20 million in mysteriously missing funds.
One of our state politicians tried to get government buildings designed by the "rules" of Fung Shui. You cannot top that!
But What is the Copyleft Exactly? (Score:2)
So my question would be, if the copyright is still in force
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Because the owner of the copyrighted work wants it to be, and the Czech government apparently has some collective rights management agencies that would like some system for Copyleft works.
I can see that in theory but I have a hard time imagining the government agency has a workable system to collect royalties on, for example, a file containing source code that is floating around the internet.
I suppose this agency could pursue users of the finished program or application but...isn't it up to the author to decide how much to charge for the program? And via the GPL the author has decided to charge $0.00.
I get the feeling this is intended for artistic works that get performed, or books that ge
So add one line to copyleft / GPL. (Score:3, Insightful)
No rights are granted to the Czech republic or those within its borders.
Sue the fuckers every time someone uses a piece of Linux software or some clip art.
If you don't want to play nice then you don't get to play at all.