(Via BoingBoing). It seems that the concept of giving away software and, shock! horror!, allowing other people to package that software up and then sell it on, was a bit too much for one Trading Standards officer…

A little while ago, I received an e-mail from a lady in the Trading Standards department of a large northern town. They had encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them.

I wrote back, politely explaining the principles of copyleft – that the software was free, both as in speech and as in price, and that people copying and redistributing it was a feature, not a bug. I said that selling verbatim copies of Firefox on physical media was absolutely fine with us, and we would like her to return any confiscated CDs and allow us to continue with our plan for world domination (or words to that effect).

Unfortunately, this was not well received. Her reply was incredulous:

“I can’t believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to. Is this really the case?” she asked.

“If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted.”

Oh dear. Trading Standards are supposed to be the people who understand the law, not the ones who need quick lessons in free software licensing from a Mozilla volunteer.

It never ceases to astonish me how many people who really should know better don’t understand copyright, let alone copyleft, public domain or Creative Commons. I’ve been quite active in a number of writing communities, for example, and the very people who you would think would be well up on all this stuff turn out to be quite uninformed, and make dreadful assumptions about the effects of releasing work under an enabling licence such as CC.

This is an issue that also came up during the APIG DRM hearing, that few people understand even the basics of copyright law. Most people don’t know that in the UK there is no right to private copying. The majority of people think that it’s perfectly fine and legal for them to make a private copy of a work, but strictly speaking, it’s not. It wasn’t until technology made that copying both easier to do and easier to find out about that the copyright holders felt moved to crack down on it.

We really need some sort of educational program to teach people about copyright law that could then feed in to a wider understanding and debate of the need for copyright reform. (To include, say, a right to private copying.) I guess that’s another thing to go onto the ORG To Do list.