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Imagine your server based app suddenly become instantly copyable and deployable by anyone visiting your site, at no charge to them or you. You launch your latest startup and within 6 hours there are thousands of clones around the world competing with you. This new reality applies to any new web or mobile app you build. That would terrify me.

A technology that could instantly clone any software service would have to be magical enough that I think its benefits would outweigh the drawback of killing a business model.

Unless the result was no more software services.

Why would we want individual software services when we have one software service that solves all those problems?

Try this spin: if you release a program as FOSS with the GNU license, why should anyone respect the licence?

Same with movies/music: before release, nobody has a copy. It is then released subject to terms you may or may not like; nonetheless, those are the terms and if you don't like them you have no right to disregard them & make a copy anyway.

It's not like smells. Software, be it programs or movies, does not diffuse by itself to random passers by. Copies are deliberate, and each is subject to contract law.

The GPL is a hack. If copyright goes away, you could just copy, disassemble, or duplicate the funcionality of a piece of sotware in order to learn how to tell your computer to do exactly what you wanted. DRM would go wild and hardware oriented, and a constant arms race would follow, but DRM may be an impossible problem.

For example, I'm producing a closed-source, proprietary piece of software to make a living. I will aggressively defend my copyright. Do I believe in copyright? No. But I'm operating in a bad system and I need to eat. In a better world, I'd be doing the same thing as work for hire for a group of actors within the industry who would collectively benefit from it, and customizing for any who had particularly unique use cases. I'd be working to reduce friction for the entire system and to make the tools that computers are generally more useful, rather than reenforcing the oligarchies of the market leaders who can pay my price (which is almost completely unrelated to my effort, but rather to the value of advantage over competitors in an underserved market.) My software being proprietary is just limiting general productivity gains and distorting the market (from whence comes it's value), and my enforcement is just limiting everyone's freedom to use their own machines.

another tl;dr, the GPL hack creates an island of freedom within a restrictive framework, and if the restrictive framework is gone there's no need to respect the GPL, a child of that framework.

I think many creators of GPL software see it differently, and wouldn't be ok with people making proprietary modifications to their code, even if anyone was free to disassemble the modified code and try to make sense of it.

I know many creators of GPL software would absolutely see it differently, but they still wouldn't get to tell me how to use my own computer. Restrictions on your freedom to express yourself is what the GPL was designed to fix, even though it itself is a restriction on your freedoms.

We can't oppress the poor DRM artists:)

The world I want is a world where people don't have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make movies like Avatar. They can make movies that good themselves in their free time as a hobby. Other people who like the idea can get on board and help. In the end the result is shared with everyone like telling stories around a big global campfire. (They may or may not then sing Kumbaya).

That seems ridiculously impossible and utopian right now, but I'll bet that won't always be so. How do we get there from here? I'd really like to short circuit the part where everyone that believes this is impossible or undesirable economically has to die off before this can happen.

Your analogy of a server based app is not a great one. If Google shared all of its source code, it would be a huge security risk and embarrassing amongst other things, but it would not lead to the end of their business by any means. Google makes money because they create a massive infrastructure that is NOT simply copyable. The fact that you can't read the actual Java, C etc. code that is executing on the server doesn't really matter: even if you could there is so much more value in the business than just that. Duck Duck Go is a great example: it has roughly the same quality search results as Google, but if you just gave the Google source code to DDG they wouldn't all of a sudden eat Google's lunch.

If you could all of a sudden press a button and copy all of that infrastructure, and spin up jobs and get the recruits that they have etc. the value provided by Google would be minimized. This is the nature of progression.

What exactly is the real value made by creating Avatar when the same value can be provided for free by an uneducated child who downloads it off the internet? Shouldn't we be organizing our economy around rewarding the things that actually do provide value (ie: getting the content to the person who wants it), rather than the thing thats correlated with providing value (content creation in and of itself)? Copyright is just a miniature monopoly.

Movie theaters still provide a great value. Despite the fact that I can rent or download a movie for much cheaper I still go to them for the end experience. We need to organize the economy around incentivizing end experiences, not incentivizing correlated factors.

You're trying to sidestep rather than confront the issue.

s/google/some company that runs on AWS

Or this: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2010/08/17/blizza...

I'm not sure what you mean by sidestepping, and I'm also not sure what you are trying to say with that article. Blizzard sued and won based on current copyright law, which I'm arguing is FUBAR.

Edit: Ok now I see what you are saying. I stand by my argument. If your business can be duplicated by me pressing a button, your business is not providing value and the government shouldn't protect it. I don't think we are devaluing what musicians/artists do, but instead what distributors do. Concert sales are up, record sales are down. This makes sense to me.

>If your business can be duplicated by me pressing a button, your business is not providing value and the government shouldn't protect it.

So most web businesses are not providing value. Neither are any other software businesses. Neither are authors.

Except that loads of people want and need software and websites and books. Somehow it seems like this scarcity-based, property-based system of valuation doesn't work well.

Who wants to build the start-up that disrupts capitalism?

No. Most business software by itself is not providing value. You could not clone any web business (or any business for that matter) with the click of a button because the business is a lot more than software.

Providing content by means of distribution is not adding value. It's only that: distribution. The creator is adding the value. Why should he not be rewarded? With your line of argument you are in line with the entertainment industry who effectively monopolized the distribution channels for a long time.

That's the basic premise I'm fighting against. What I'm arguing is that that's not actually true.

If you cure cancer but you keep it in your basement should you be rewarded for that?

If you know the cure for cancer, but you didn't invent it yourself, should you be prevented from spreading it?

Your argument is that you never get the cure for cancer without incentivizing someone with the financial rewards to do it, which is a fair one logically, but in the case of the reality of the music industry it's quite simply not what's happened (the RIAA themselves have funded studies that actually showed piracy increasing profits). Instead the music market has been enlarged, and the RIAA is simply getting less of it. This is a Good Thing.

My argument is not inline with the entertainment industry because I am arguing that copyright infringement should no longer be a crime. People who provide the value of getting valued ideas to people should be paid for it, regardless of who created the idea. Publishers don't provide the value of creating or spreading ideas, they provide the value of selling a copy of an idea. We shouldn't give them licenses that says they do anything else because they don't.

That argument breaks down when you consider the average drug company spends more money on advertising than R&D. Many studio's spend more money on movie promotion than movie advertising.