Z:gnu-www-ja-eldred-amicus--ab97e2-This brief is filed on behalf/en

This brief is filed on behalf of the Free Software Foundation, a charitable corporation with its main offices in Boston, Massachusetts. [1]  The Foundation believes that people should be free to study, share and improve all the software they use, as they are free to share and improve all the recipes they cook with, and that this right is an essential aspect of the system of free expression in a technological society. The Foundation has been working to achieve this goal since 1985 by directly developing and distributing, and by helping others to develop and distribute, software that is licensed on terms that permit all users to copy, modify and redistribute the works, so long as they give others the same freedoms to use, modify and redistribute in turn. The Foundation is the largest single contributor to the GNU operating system (used widely today in its GNU/Linux variant for computers from PCs to supercomputer clusters). The Foundation's GNU General Public License is the most widely used &ldquo;free software&rdquo; license, covering major components of the GNU operating system and tens of thousands of other computer programs used on tens of millions of computers around the world. The Foundation is strongly interested in the use and development of copyright law to encourage sharing, and to protect the rights of users and the public domain.