End intellectual property
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It creates a situation in which every individual using the internet violates, or benefits from the violation of, civil law every day.
It creates a situation in which individuals cannot be trusted to run code on hardware they own.
It creates the conditions for censorship on online platforms.
Just end copyright. The idea that software, music, movies, books and so on will cease to exist is a complete farce.
I'll keep writing software. You will too. Most of us here will.
Maybe not the commercially driven ones.
I think we've seen enough damage from that already over the last few years.
Or any company could make a closed source distribution of linux?
To answer your second question, most individual users of Linux use it for the openness, not the zero cost. I'd imagine businesses do not care so much about openness, though mine is extremely paranoid against using closed source.
Yes. I contribute to and create software with licences that permit it.
In a world with copyright I prefer GPL-type licenses, in a world without copyright everything would be MIT-like.
A legal requirement to attribute might be nice but I don't really care. I think that the legal system should deal with matters of importance, not social politeness.
> Or any company could make a closed source distribution of linux?
Sure. They wouldn't be able to prevent anyone from copying it.
Ultimately I can't really see a viable business model for it that doesn't already exist - e.g. Android is already essentially closed source, partly due to a bunch of binary blobs and partly due to all of the infrastructure built up around the platform.
If you want to apply a license to something there has to be something to license.
It's unclear to me what point you're making here.
In a world without copyright all software would be usable in the same way MIT software is now, except there'd be no attribution requirement.
I specifically mentioned that in my post.
Everything would be public domain.
That's the problem of the internet, not of intellectual property. And it would be easily solved by technology in the near future.
> It creates a situation in which individuals cannot be trusted to run code on hardware they own.
No it doesn't. It's not a matter of trust, it's a matter of pirating material, which is theft.
> It creates the conditions for censorship on online platforms.
No it does not. People will not be banned from expressing their opinion online if their opinion doesn't contain anything copyrighted.
> Just end copyright. The idea that software, music, movies, books and so on will cease to exist is a complete farce.
What is a complete farce is people that don't understand that without the economic motivation, most people don't do things.
Piracy has created huge problems in the past for home computers, for example. It was impossible to monetize the creation of a good game, although most people have played those games, due to piracy, which killed a lot of game software houses around 25-30 years ago.
> I'll keep writing software. You will too. Most of us here will.
Yeah right. Would Red Dead Redemption 2 be made with such an economic model? no, it would not. Who would have funded it? no one.
> I think we've seen enough damage from that already over the last few years.
What damage? there isn't any damage whatsoever from copyright.
If that's your viewpoint, fine. I don't have to agree, I think it's ridiculous to consider bits uncopyable and lock down general purpose computers so that video games and movies have nicer graphics.
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But, it has been so far extended that multinationals and grandchildren are those that reap the benefits now, while stealing from the public domain.
The best quote I've read on the subject said something like, "But, how will we incentivize dead people to create new works!?" I think that about sums up the current situation.
The arguments are in the same class as those we've seen from RMS, who's invoked and quoted early on. Most generalize to Slippery Slope.
I agree that we are sliding, but not because IP maximalism is naturally downhill from where we are, or because the hill is all that slippery. Legal changes take push. They're being pushed. Strong incentives abound. Broad concepts like "tort" aren't the cause of, say, intentional infliction of emotional distress doctrines. First sale doctrines aren't developing under rhetorical sway of "intellectual property" like breach notification laws are developing under "privacy".
The best recent account of how IP rights form, expand, and strengthen that I've read recently is Rothman's The Right of Publicity. She cites and decries the "property syllogism", too. But also details the kinds of conflicts, competing interests, and finer doctrinal confusions that lead to such rules.
There is a strong point to be made on rhetoric. But I don't think playing into WIPO's branding importance makes it, or any substitute for it.
I believe that copyright should be eternal and one should be able to profit from their works for as long as their works are found desirable by other people.
There is nothing to be gained by abolishing copyright. Our culture will not become richer. Statistically speaking, very few creators can build works of art as valuable as the ones that their works are based on. The works that have contributed the most, by far, are all original works.
What is hidden behind these movements is another facet of the socialist utopia, which does away with merit and wants equality of outcome for everyone, which is impossible to achieve, as it has been proven again and again in history.
Imagine if scientific discovery had been protected by copyright terms, we'd be a lot further behind.