Okay, so it’s just a catchy title but an irony of this ridiculous debate about corporate responsibility just the same. Here at IGF in Athens, there’s a discussion of how corporations should use their “massive bargaining power” to influence the internal policies of repressive regimes. As discussed in my previous post, this is a ridiculous argument because corporations do NOT have that kind of power at all.
First, governments like China can choose to simply pirate the products of companies like Cisco, rather than paying for them. This happens all the time. Perhaps this one area where IGF may find consensus that piracy is NOT good.
Second, the rise of free and open source software has given repressive regimes another option. By making open source software freely available, FLOSS developers are sidestepping both moral and legal restrictions on trade that might otherwise change the world. As FLOSS starts to run super computers thanks to IBM, we’ll actually be making software freely available that is expressly forbidden for export to just such regimes and terrorist organizations. Shame on you FOSS people!
Perhaps, the next version of the GPLv3 should go further than simply banning the use of GPL software for DRM and include limitations on who can use the software based on moral grounds (see Section 3 – the DRM provision – of the GPLv3 discussion draft ). There has been a lot of discussion about these types of limitations during the drafting process, but nothing has come of it.
Doesn’t really matter though; it would be useless anyway. Those repressive regimes don’t really care about copyright law and would just pirate the code.
In the end, this post is designed to demonstrate how ridiculous this argument has become. We can’t look to either corporations or the open source community to enforce the world’s various forms of moral righteousness.