Anarchism FAQ?! WTF?...

[Jan Claeys]

On di, 2007-02-13 at 22:11 -0500, Eric Dunbar wrote:
> As for the distinction between IP prosecutions and political
> PERSECUTION -- I think that's a fairly self-evident comparison. The
> one is trivial and relates to REASONABLE legal limits and the rule of
> law within the confines of human rights and freedoms protections [1]
> whereas the other is subject arbitrary detention without the
> protection of law operating within the confines of strong human rights
> and freedoms protections.

Unfortunately those "political" laws exist, and not only in countries
with a non-democratic government.
E.g. including a package that contains the text of "Mein Kampf" could
result in the Ubuntu package archives to be blocked for German users.

> [1] However much one may disagree with IP rights and protections,
> GNU/BSD/whatever your OSS poison may be COULD NOT EXIST without strong
> IP rights protection -- what would prevent a company from co-opting a
> GNU-protected program and never releasing the code if users could
> legally and ethically decide to ignore IP rights. 

Most people think "IP laws" like the DMCA & EUCD are quite unreasonable,
but we don't include libdvdcss2 because they exist...


I _don't_ want to exclude packages for those reasons though; but we
might have to host such packages only in countries with less insane
laws.  That would maybe also allow the Ubuntu project to e.g. provide
things like the DVD CSS decryption library in some countries...


-- 
Jan Claeys