On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 9:06 PM, Tom Morris tom@tommorris.org wrote:
On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 09:11, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
This is not a theoretical risk. This has happened. Most famously in the case of Virgin using pictures of persons that were licenced under a free licence, in their advertising campaign. I hesitate to call this argument fatuous, but it's relevance is certainly highly questionable. Nobody has raised this is as a serious argument except you assume it has been. This is the bit that truly is a straw horse. The "downstream use" objection was *never* about downstream use of _content_ but downstream use of _labels_ and the structuring of the semantic data. That is a real horse of a different colour, and not of straw.
I was drawing an analogy: the point I was making is very simple - the general principle of "we shouldn't do X because someone else might reuse it for bad thing Y" is a pretty lousy argument, given that we do quite a lot of things in the free culture/open source software world that have the same problem. Should the developers of Hadoop worry that (your repressive regime of choice) might use their tools to more efficiently sort through surveillance data of their citizens?
No, just to keep the facts straight, you were not making an analogy, you were comparing apples with oranges. Even the sheerest imitation of your argument being an analogy breaks down when you consider that in fact for it to stand to scrutiny, you would have to believe that looking at at something, and looking at something and making your mind up over what it was you were looking at are the same thing. Which of course they are *not*.