But the problem presented in GPLv3 was not stimulating a broad movement against software patenting. Our objective in GPLv3 was to get an overall agreement against every form of betrayal of common interests using patent law by those within the community defined by the license. The simplest form of such an agreement would be a provision such as
if you exercise any right with respect to this work for which permission under this license is required, you must license to all parties all essential patent claims of yours necessary to exercise all rights in the work under this license.
This “if you touch it, you must make it safe from your patents” approach had only two problems: (1) the movement considered it too narrow, and (2) it was much too broad to be acceptable to almost all patent holders.
So our task was to formulate collaboratively, with the affected parties, a set of obligations patent-holders would voluntarily accept with respect to GPL‘d free software. The patent holders would need voluntarily to agree, under a principle of mutual disarmament, to give an immunity from enforcement of their essential claims to all others sharing and improving the same works as they distribute or improve themselves. In other words, our task was to work out voluntary partial subjection of a large number of capitalist companies’ patent claims to anarchist control for the public good.
From before 1998, when the United States Congress issued the Digital Millennium Copyrights Act like an ATM receipt for entertainment industry deposits, the companies that merchandise low-rent mental activity at high prices have been in a near-continuous state of panic. Their reenactment of a recurrent 20th-century ritual (denounce new technology as the end of the world, attempt vehemently and corruptly to prohibit new technology, adopt new technology, profit furiously from degeneration of technology’s cultural possibility) on this occasion has involved them in numerous brutalities, absurdities and crimes, most of which needn’t concern us for present purposes.
What concerned us, in particular, was a technical rather than ideological consequence of their attempts to prohibit the future. It’s true that we considered their morals to have come no distance whatever since the primordial slime, but that wasn’t what we needed to deal with in the license. The statutes they were buying, however, were designed to make their control over “content” permanent by preventing people from modifying software in their own multimedia devices. Such statutory provisions might be used to prohibit user modification of software whose authors wanted to ensure user rights.