Is Open Source Software?

In the text “Sustaining our commonwealth of Nature and Knowledge” by Herman Daly, he clarifies the fact that goods are classified by the access of law to the goods, which it is classified as excludable and non-excludable, and by the physically use of the owner of the good, rival and non-rival. Every market good, an automobile, is rival and excludable and every public good, for example, the sun, is non-rival and non-excludable. But the problematic comes when the good is non-rival and excludable, an example he gives us is knowledge because it is usually patented and made by intellectual property. Also, the problematic comes when the good is rival and non-excludable because the management of these goods, such as fish, brings the tragedy of open-source

In the global market that we leave in companies are trying to find any and everyway that they can to get ahead in their respective markets. This most of the time brings out the most innovate thinkers that can come up with a way to keep it’s company on top of their market and sometimes we see that there are companies that like to take a short cut by using non legal and malicious methods. According to Lewis, (1985), Software piracy is the illicit copying of the operating instructions and applications programs, which make computers work, is a large and growing industry. The Pirate Bay is part of a European social and political movement that opposes copyrighted content and demands that music, videos, TV shows, and other digital content be free and unrestricted. In the words of the Pirate Party, “the Pirate Bay is a unique platform for distributing culture between regular people and independent artists, and that’s something we want to preserve.”

Based on Davidson and Kumagai’s (2008) article, list three advantages and risks associated with open source software.

The purpose of the copyright system has always been to promote creativity in society and protect the creators’ interests. In applying copyright laws to any creation, three basic guidelines apply. First is the fair return for a creators labor, second is “Fair Use” of the creators’ labor and finally the Progress of Science and useful Arts to further the public good. The application of these three guidelines in litigation for A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, found that the rights of reproduction, and distribution had been violated, in effect upholding the copyrights of nineteen different music companies represented under A&M Records name, this ruling had protected the music industries interests. However it would seem that the publishing industry would not be so lucky, litigation in Authors’ Guild vs. Google ruled that Google’s actions constituted fair use. Under these two scenarios’ the copyright laws’ have, effectively, protected the rights of music artists’, protected the public’s right to “fair use” and sparked new opportunities for creative growth. However, lawmakers continue to struggle to define copyright boundaries between the public’s right of use and the creators right to profit from their efforts.

While researching the Open Source Software topic I found a wealth of information in the internet as well as many technical periodicals but, was most intrigued by the work of Richard M. Stallman in the book Free Software Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, which will be used as on of the references in this research. An interesting point found in Mr. Stallman book is that most people hear the work Open Source Software and they immediately think Linux. While the

Colin Harris1 ABSTRACT: This paper uses the entangled political economy framework developed by Wagner (2014) to analyze the effects that copyright legislation has on content producers and pirate communities. I identify Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies as part of the superfluous discovery process that results when politically enforced copyright legislation works to subsidize the cost of creating property rights in creative goods. I also analyze the effects that criminal sanctions against copyright infringement have on how pirate communities choose to self-organize. I conclude with the claim that the entangled framework provides for better analysis than the tradition additive political economy framework because copyright does not work to control the outcome of the system and correct for the market failure associated with creative goods, rather it influences specific nodes in the entangled system in particular ways. KEYWORDS: Copyright, Digital Piracy, Entangled Political Economy, DRM JEL CODES: B41, B59, D02, H41, K42,

Ever since the computer software industry began during the mid-1970’s with the personal computer revolution, using intellectual property rights (IPR) to protect software has been controversial. Presently, software can be protected using both copyright and patents. The issue of software patentability is particularly contentious. On one side there are the large, mainly U.S. based corporations, such as IBM, Microsoft and Apple, who dominate the software market and have traditionally been are advocates for strong intellectual property protection for software. On the other side there is the open-source/free software movement who believe software should not be

This essay discusses the usefulness of the Digital Economy Act (the 2010 Act) in preventing infringement of copyright. The essay will start off discussing the provisions which imposed ISPs to stop individuals from infringing copyright. Followed by analysing the 2010 Act which caused widespread controversy and outrage in the United Kingdom. Moreover, my intention is to ascertain whether it has been effective since its implementation. Also, I will briefly outline the key provisions relating to infringement of copyright. I will consequently restrict comments to some copyright-related issues, concentrating on peer-to-peer file sharing over the Internet. Thirdly, practical examples will be given to evaluate the DEA. Using legislation, case law and journal articles I will present my findings.

It was hoped that the usage of the newer term “open source” would eliminate such ambiguity, and would also be easier to “market” to business users (who might mistakenly associate “free software” with anti-commericalism). Since its introduction, however, the “open source” label has been criticized for fostering an ambiguity of a different kind: that of confusing it for mere availability of the source, rather than the freedom to use, modify, and redistribute it.

When Tim Berners-Lee created the Internet as a non-proprietor, not-for-profit information conduit, he could not have predicted how controversial digitized intellectual property would become. Prior to the Internet, intellectual property was a fairly straightforward issue. It was protected with copyright, trademark, and patent legislations, which granted exclusive rights to owners. Violations were not as abundant because distribution was constrained by time and space. Moreover, violators were identifiable because anonymity was difficult to achieve. In today's "global village" however, digital information such as books, music, software and art can be instantly shared between two

2012 has begun as a complex year for the creative arts industry, as well as for the online community. Policy makers are working closely with creators of intellectual content to develop new legislations that would prevent intellectual property from being stolen. SOPA and PIPA have not managed to raise the necessary support due to a series of limitations, but the need for legislations remains intense, as online piracy continues to increase.

Digital and networking technology have vastly reshaped the way the world acquires and uses knowledge; by increasing the amount of creative content that is available to everyone worldwide and the variety of sources from which an individual can choose to acquire that data. This content is often created by many individuals collaborating to form large groups of people who all contribute creative content. Intellectual property (IP) is the content that is created by either an individual or a group of individuals. The distribution of free content, software, and ideas has successfully limited many societies dependency for established channels of distribution and production [cyberethics]. More and more however as the internet becomes a digitally real the ability to go to the internet and escape the established channels of distribution has become increasingly difficult, concerns over the legal issues with the way some, or at times most, of the ways material is acquired. Some experts believe that intellectual property laws have stifled the access to many of these works, and in doing so have decreased the rate at which the creative content can expand, grow, and progress. Laws like the Digital Millennial Copyright Act (DMCA) and the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) have shifted, perhaps unfairly, the balance between intellectual property owners and the general users of these creative works. These laws have been put into affect for the sole

While researching the question posed, and trying to get a better understanding of all the different types of software, I came across many arguments of open vs. proprietary. Many of the arguments that I read, the writers all had good information to support their opinion of which type of software they thought was best. One article that I found interesting was posted on a website (http://www.geekzone.co.nz/foobar/5204), and it proposed that the debate of “Open source vs. Proprietary” be turned around to “Proprietary software vs. Open “. The writer of this article posed the question, “Why is proprietary the default and not open source?” After carefully researching the different types of software, I found myself asking the same question. If you look closely at all of the so called “compelling advantages” that people tend to think proprietary software has over open, you would clearly see that they aren’t all that compelling. One of the arguments raised has to do with support. There is this belief that proprietary software offers better support......is this only because many consumers feel that if they pay top dollar for a product they in turn

Around 1991, the GNU Project had amassed a respectable number of software packages, including the widely used GCC and Emacs, though it still lacked the core, a kernel. Then, more than six thousand kilometers away, a twenty-one-year-old Finnish university student began developing a small, open source system as a hobby. Once the open source community became interested in it, what started as a small project capable of little more than displaying text quickly morphed into one of the most widely-distributed pieces of software in history, containing more than twenty million lines of code, contributed to by tens of thousands of developers across the globe, and with

Currently, with help of high technical development of computers, we can surf and share information easily in the Internet. Some see the Internet as a sea of information. The Internet represents a current our life and we can’t dream our lives without using it. Once we click, we find information without hard labor like browsing a whole library. Nevertheless, there occurs a problem when considering how much we share the information with others without breaking the rules about copyrights and stealing data from others’ computers. A copyright is the exclusive legal right to publish, reproduce and sell literacy, music and artistic works (Featherly, 2001). It grants authors the exclusive