[pp.int.general] where is the manifesto?

[Helmut Pozimski]

Am Sunday 28 December 2008 06:44:59 schrieb Richard M Stallman:
>     and investigate the reason for such a right. Some human rights
> provisions can be changed by a (complicateed) democratic process, but
> others can't, like the first 20 articles of the German constitution - which
> include the "protection of property" provision.
>
> I can see two ways around that:
>
> * To declare that copyrights are not property, so this does
> not apply.
That is simply not possible. There is no law saying "copyright is property". 
All that is based on a judgement of the German constitutional court. The only 
thing to abolish the property nature of copyright would be to abolish the 
whole copyright. (And we all obviously don't want to do that)
> * To declare that if the state, by legislation, can constitute
> a new kind of property, it can also, by legislation, disconstitute
> that kind of property, in a uniform and fair way.
Also impossible. But it might not be necessary to to something like that at 
all. As I already started, the constitunitional ruled that authors' rights 
are by their nature property rights. However, that does not mean that you 
can't change the law regarding authors' rights or it has full constitiutional 
protection like physical property. On the contrary, not every aspect of the 
exploitation rights has that protection at all and the protection regarding 
authors' rights is as well only of limited nature. We discussed this earlier 
in the German pirate party and we came to the conclusion that it is most 
likely possible to do the changes we want to achieve, but we have to be 
really really careful when doing it.

regards
Helmut
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