Immediately after the panel ended, he did the strangest thing: he came up to shake my hand.

Further evidence that the FSF people are crazy? CC allows people an easy way to reserve less rights. The trouble is that people don't understand what CC is, and people are slapping CC licenses on works that they would otherwise place in the public domain simply because they think CC is hip, which actually reduces the scope of the public domain. I think he has a point there.

But to go further and oppose what CC is doing is silly. Essential rights ARE unreservable! The debate is over what rights are essential, and that debate is a matter of copyright law and not of licenses. What CC AND FSF allow you to do is choose a license in which nonessential rights aren't reserved. Turning this into an anti-copyright political movement is at best premature.

Does FSF propose that the right to redistribute someone elses work is an essential right that ought to be constitutionally protected? If so they need to solve the tremendous economic questions that such an essential right would create. This is more then just creating a movement, and so far the arguements for how you eat bits have been falicious. (No one makes money selling GNU licensed software. Some people make money supporting it, but you don't provide technical support for a sound recording so this is not a universal solution. Stock is not income, (ehm!). Its not really free as in beer if someone paid for the development with a grant (EHM!).) I support the effort to look at these problems but taking a dogmatic stance is not constructive. You are not going to see a political movement until you figure out how things are going to work once that movement is successful.

RE: FSF - Fireworks in Montreal (2005-07-01 to 2005-07-05)