> If there were no copyright protection, these works wouldn't have been created.
Citation needed. You can freely copy and distribute linux and it still got made.
Citation needed. You can freely copy and distribute linux and it still got made.
> In a world without copyright, companies would be free to make their own modifications and keep them secret, making it more or less impossible to integrate them into a cohesive whole the way they are more or less forced to do today.
Private modifications that are never shared with a third party are fine with the GPL. Eg Google doesn't have to share whatever kernel they are using on their internal servers with you.
BSD is also protected by copyright, but it matters less for permissive licenses. It still protects attribution (so you can't claim it yours), but it probably would have worked without it, unlike with Linux that is for a big part defined by the "copyleft" protections offered by its licence.
Well, you could imagine a world that protects the 'moral' rights of authors like attribution, but doesn't otherwise prohibit anyone from duplicating or modifying works.
So something like the French system minus copyright would approximate the BSD license.
(I was thinking of Germany, which works similarly, if memory serves right. You also cannot release anything you write into the public domain by German law, though you can do legal moves that are essentially equivalent.)
That's why some people like to call it 'Gnu/Linux', but thanks to recent advances we can make Gnu-free Linuxes today, too.
> There are far fewer success stories of artworks being made in this style. (E.g. there are successful multiplayer open-source games or clones of existing games, but very few original single-player games, and those that there are are largely the work of a single individual)
Humans have made art since forever. Large collaborative efforts like eg a cathedral are a more recent invention. But by these standards copyright was practically invented yesterday.
I was talking about the kernel, though what I said applies to both.
> Humans have made art since forever.
Perhaps, but not the kind of long-form narrative experiences that we're talking about here. (Sagas and epics predate copyright, but those are a quite different form, and indeed have much the same downsides - struggles with coherence and consistency when there are multiple authors, inability to put everything together in a sensible arc).
Something like the BSD licenses approximates 'no copyright' better, perhaps? But also not completely.
If there were copyright, those works wouldn’t have been created.
The GP is referring to legal protections, and guess what?
Linux is legally protected by copyright!
Linux is legally protected by copyright!
Linux is legally protected by copyright!
Nearly every GPL license--every one that we could name--protects a copyrighted work! Nearly every GFDL, AGPL, LGPL protects works by means of copyright law!
Can you imagine that? So do the Apache license, the BSD licenses, the MIT license! Creative Commons (except for CC0) these licenses are legally protecting copyrighted works. Thank you!
Now everyone who proposes to draw down limits on copyright coverage and reduce the length of terms and limit Disney from their Mouse rights, y'all are also proposing the same limits on GPL software, such as Linux, and nearly every work with a license from the above list -- all of Wikimedia Commons, much of Flickr.com, all your beloved F/OSS software will be subject to the same limitations and the same restrictions you want to put on Paramount and the RIAA's labels.