[pp.int.general] Subject: Re: International Pirates Day

[Richard Stallman]

    FOSS depends on copyright to a large extent! The fact that the programmer 
    does not use his copyright (which he gets by law, whether he lieks it or 
    not) for commercial exploitatioon, but to decide under what conditions other 
    are allowed to use the software he wrote. It is the basis for the GNU 
    licences, etc.

Free software licenses are based on copyright (and we do enforce them
in court), but that doesn't mean free software essentially requires
copyright.

Copyleft (as in the GNU General Public License, GNU GPL) uses
copyright law to block various ways of making the code non-free.  That
can be done using copyright, EULAs, software patents, withholding
source code, and tivoization.

As long as those practices are generally lawful, copyleft (which is
based on copyright) is the only lever we can use to prevent them from
being practiced on our free software.  However, if those practices are
prevented in some other way, then we won't need to use copyright to
prevent them.  Then free software won't need software copyright at all.