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Comment by DoctorOetker | Hacker News Reader

If an advanced alien species popped up, and were to observe humanity today, it probably would have a hard time understanding why a species would intentionally cripple its future so hard by punishing violators of copy-'right'.

It would even be astonished if there weren't any copyright: it wouldn't understand why empty HDD's weren't 90% capacity preloaded with STEM materials at the manufacturing plant. The user could always format.

The majority of nations are lagging in the majority of STEM subjects, why on earth don't they impose a differential STEMpty-ness tax on imported HDD's? Want to import a drive without randomized sampling of research, current and historical? pay extra to the STEM drive pot; imported a STEM drive? receive a little extra from the STEM drive pot.

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If you haven’t seen it, I recommend Max Headroom, especially Season 2. Episode 13: “Lessons”

The series is about a sci-fi dystopia. Unfortunately, most of their predictions have come to pass. That episode is particularly relevant.

When it aired, it seemed absurd that we would cripple our future by punishing people that freely disseminated educational materials.

I guess I’m old enough to play the part of the “advanced” alien species in your hypothetical.

I find it interesting that humans always assume alien behavior would be exactly the behavior that they believe is the best behavior for humans. We can't project our ethics on to aliens, there are an infinite number of evolutionary strategies that may develop. Aliens may view enslaving the majority of their fellow species and keeping them uneducated as ethical because it might make for a more efficient structure. More likely, all of their concepts would be completely foreign and incomprehensible to us.

Anyway, putting STEM material on every computer wouldn't do anything because the barrier isn't the availability of knowledge, it's that most people aren't interested in that information. 99.9% of human knowledge is easily available online, just as easy if not easier than opening a file on a HDD. That's not to say that SciHub isn't necessary, because it is and I use it all the time.

There's no open source without copyright.

Maybe not in today's form, but a world without copyright would be a different world, perhaps one in which people would work for free software because it's what they believe in. It would represent a fundamental shift in how the public viewed knowledge, sharing, and openness.

There is no licenses like GPLv3 without copyright. But many others would not be necessary, as everything would be essentially under a permissive license.

This is true, however without copyright I think many other things would change making the GPL a lot less necessary. For example, no one could prevent you giving your friend a copy of a program, so the market would change a whole lot. Basically, the thing about BSD that GPL doesn't like is that BSD permits proprietary software being created. Without copyright, there isn't really proprietary software any more, and less of a reason to keep source secret.

(Most of this thinking comes pre-web-applications, that does change the parameters a bit.)

Yes, that's why I mentioned GPL v3.

Without the rich owning everything there'd be no need for robinhood either.

Even if Windows weren't under copyright, I don't expect it would be practical to have an OS based off of random leaks of source code without any of the rest of MS's infrastructure.

Free knowledge like mathematics existed before copyright and was free as in freedom.

Yes, and mathematicians were supported financially by universities, by the patronage of the wealthy, or were independently wealthy. Wherever knowledge production and creative work occur, someone is paying for it.

True, without wealth people would think about nothing but food.

That's clearly untrue. The ultra-permissive 'copycenter' licences used by projects like FreeBSD, are very similar to releasing into the public domain (i.e. waiving copyrights).

There'd be no copyleft (GPL etc) without copyright, sure.

A hobby of mine is wandering into libertarian communities and asking if there is such a thing as "intellectual property," then walk out whistling.

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