Open Source and Trading Standards

Gervase Markham has a great article in Times on his interaction with a Trading Standards officer about Mozilla (Markham handles licensing issues for the Mozilla Foundation).

"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."

Essentially open source is eroding the nice easy simplifications of copyright law that people have been working by, mistaking their simplifications for law.

I've also got to say that if open source does indeed make it "virtually impossible [...] to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation," then the free software people (who're into open source software motivated by a political belief that copyright as it exists is wrong) are winning.