In other words, when free software was born, if you wanted to clone, interoperate with, improve, or modify any existing software, all you needed to do was reverse-engineer that software and go to town. The GPL wasn’t permission to make something new that was compatible with something that already existed. People who knew how to make software already behaved as though that was something they were permitted to do, irrespective of the feelings of the company or individual whose code they were interacting with. The GPL was a request for companies and software authors to make this process easier and less tedious by handing out source code, so that would-be interoperators could skip the wasteful, time-consuming reverse-engineering step and go right to the good stuff – making a new thing that improved upon (and/or competed with) whatever was already made. The GPL was icing on the cake. Applying the GPL to your code didn’t signal that you’d forswear legal vengeance upon those who wanted to make something compatible with your thing. You had no right to that vengeance! Applying the GPL to your code signalled that you wanted to collaborate with interoperators, rather than impotently shake your fist at them from the sidelines as they went right ahead and interoperated with your code against your wishes. [...] Forty years ago, we had cake and asked for icing on top of it. Today, all we have left is the icing, and we’ve forgotten that the cake was ever there. If code isn’t licensed as “free,” you’d best leave it alone. [...] Interoperability is the default state of the world. Anyone’s charcoal will burn in your barbecue, just as anyone’s gas will make your car go. Any manufacturer can make a lightbulb that fits in your light-socket and any shoes can be worn with any socks. [..] Interoperability lowers “switching costs” – the cost of leaving behind whatever you’re using now in favor of something you think will suit you better. [...] Companies like high switching costs. For a would-be monopolist, the best product is one that’s seductively easy to start using and incredibly hard to get rid of. Think of Purdue Pharma’s gleeful internal memos – revealed in leaks and court cases – about the ease with which their “customers” were getting started on opioids and how hard it was for those same people to switch away. Addiction isn’t the only way to raise switching costs. Facebook makes it incredibly easy to get started [...] But when you want to leave Facebook, there’s no easy way to do so. You can’t go to a Facebook rival and follow what your friends post to Facebook from there. You certainly can’t reply to what your Facebook friends post using a rival service. [...] Google wants to ensure that you won’t leave the company or its products and services. It could improve its retention by making you so delighted with its offerings that you never consider leaving – but a surer, cheaper way is to interweave its products and services with your life: making sure that your kid can’t go to a public school without creating a Google account; embedding Google search in your mobile OS; releasing web- and app-development frameworks for third parties that quietly harvest the data of their users and send them to Google. [...] Interoperability improves self-determination by safeguarding your abil­ity change the your current situation by incremental steps [...] The thicket of anti-interoperability rules that has sprung up around in­teroperability has a catch-all name: “intellectual property.” [...] “intellectual property” is an incoherent category: when you assert that your work has “intellectual property” protection, do you mean that you can sue rivals to protect your customers from deception; or that the government will block rivals if you disclose the inner workings of your machines; or that you have been given just enough (but no more) incentive to publish your expressions of your ideas, with the understanding that the ideas themselves are fair game? [...] When you look at how “IP” is used by firms, a very precise – albeit colloquial – meaning emerges: “IP is any law that I can invoke that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics, and customers.” [...] Your printer uses DRM to force you to buy ink that the manufacturer has ap­proved; your phone uses DRM to force you to buy apps that the manufacturer has approved. Ventilators from Medtronic and tractors from John Deere use DRM to force you to get them repaired by the manu­facturer – and to scrap them when the manufacturer decides it’s time for you to buy a new one. [...] Bypassing DRM to get your printer to accept third-party ink is not a copyright violation: you’re not reproducing its code, nor are you duplicat­ing the traces etched into its chips. But even though you’re not breaking copyright when you jailbreak your phone, you’re still breaking copyright law. The law bans legal conduct, if you have to break DRM to engage in it. This isn’t copyright protection – it’s felony contempt of business-model. It’s not just DRM. Take “Goldman Sans,” a free font released by the finance giant and global supervil­lain Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sans is a copyrighted work, and it comes with a copyright license that you “agree” to when you download the font. Among the license terms for Goldman Sans is a non-disparage­ment clause – that is, a clause that prohibits you from criticizing Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs doesn’t need copyright law to prevent people from copying its font. It gives the font away for free. Goldman Sachs needs copyright law so it can boss people around – so it can tell them what they may (and may not) say. [...] Even where tech is challenging these monopolies, it is doing so in order to create more monopolies. Kin­dle Unlimited presents a real challenge to traditional genre publishing, and every Kindle Unlimited book is released with DRM that locks it to Amazon’s platform. Any attempt to liberate Kindle Unlimited books so they can be read with a rival’s device (or with a device designed to stop Amazon from spying on you while you read) involves breaking the DRM, and trafficking in tools to break DRM is a felony under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copy­right Act of 1998. [...] As Amazon conquers an ever-larger proportion of genre readers, it permanently locks those readers into its platform, meaning that any author who wants to access those readers will have to do so on Amazon’s terms, turning over the power of their “author’s monopoly” to be used in Amazon’s “market power monopoly” arsenal. Give authors more copyright – a stronger monopoly – and Amazon will seize that too, as a condition of reaching the audience Amazon has imprisoned in its walled garden. [...] You may have heard Netscape founder Marc Andrees­sen’s famous phrase: “Software is eating the world.” It’s not quite true. Software has eaten the world. Past tense. If there was any doubt, the pandemic erased it. Locked down, viewing the world through our screens, there is no longer any distinction between human rights and digital rights. There is no software freedom. There’s only freedom. Continua su https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/ Giacomo