So here’s a 28 minute movie about the current patent system in the USA. It’s a good study about how absurd a patent system for pure mathematical formulas is and might become in other countries.

Don’t shoot me for having an opinion, but I got some problems with it:

It doesn’t really explain the problem for non-technical people. I can’t use this to show a friend what might become a problem in Europe, because I would have to explain a lot myself: what is a «troll», what is software exactly, … On top of that I think more examples like the Beethoven part could’ve been given to make this movie a lot less abstract.

The main reason why I think this movie is not of any value is the license. It’s licensed with a creative commons attribution non-derivatives license (CC BY-ND). This means I cannot make any alterations to the movie, nor make subtitles which go more into detail, neither can I fix the sound in some parts of the movie, neither can I fix problems from the previous paragraph, … before I would screen it at my university.

When I asked someone involved in the movie if that’s really okay for him, a non-derivatives license, he responded: yes. I think ND, as FSF believes too, is good for “opinion stuff”.

I don’t think ND is good for “opinion stuff” at all though. When you make something around your opinion, you have three reasons for doing so:

You want to be informative towards a certain public You want to persuade people for a certain cause You want to start a discussion

Since we live in a democracy, the latter is very important. People won’t change opinion because of a movie, they will change their opinion in debate. Not letting people make derivatives of a work equals taking away a manner of speech.

So in the end, with a ND licensed work around someone’s opinion, I cannot make the movie better for the same cause, neither can the other party take the movie and highlight their problems from the same perspective. I do not support this at all and in my opinion it makes this movie worth almost nothing.

-Pieter — follow me on identi.ca