Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

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Re: The Lie of "IP"

Author:	William Crim
Posted:	9/2/2000; 12:02:45 AM
Topic:	The Lie of "IP"
Msg #:	20735 (In response to 20730)
Prev/Next:	20734 / 20736

Basicly, at MIT and AT&T everyone was sharing code just fine. Then, as it become valuable, the companies and schools began exerting their copyrights.

If AT&T wasn't such a dumbass about UNIX, would the whole BSD movement been tied up in court for years? I guarantee Stallman would never have invented the GPL if MIT hadn't started claiming it owned the work he did and prevented him for sharing it.

Good things have ended up comming out of it all, but those barriers were and are problems. Without copyright, we also wouldn't have license wars. :-)

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