Should Copyright Be Abolished?
May 6th, 2007 by Greg Bulmash
There's an old joke in which a man asks a woman if she'd sleep with him for a million dollars. After some thought, she says yes. Then he asks her if she'd sleep with him for 50 dollars. She says, "of course not! What kind of girl do you think I am?"
"We've established what kind of girl you are," he replies. "Now we're just haggling over the price."
When it comes to a lot of the more vocal proponents of abolishing copyright, that punch line applies.
The problem with a large part of the anti-copyright crowd is that they don't understand or won't admit what copyright entails as a concept. That is the right of the creator of a work to exert some control over how it's used, who can copy and distribute it, and a right to have their authorship acknowledged.
These members of the anti-copyright crowd cite the GPL (GNU Public License) as an alternative to copyright without any sense of the ironic fact that the GPL can't exist without copyright. They're proposing a solution while simultaneously advocating the destruction of the thing that makes their solution workable. While the GPL is less restrictive than other licensing methods, it's a license and it does impose some restrictions on or conditions for use of the work. It is a method of controlling your work. But without copyright, the GPL could not be enforced.
Without copyright, the creator would have no power to dictate any licensing terms, even the GPL's licensing terms. Their work would go into the public domain and anyone anywhere could use it in any way they wanted. Drop the argument of whether or not profit motive drives creation sufficiently enough that it needs to be retained. Let's look at what happens if the GPL is unenforceable.
You create some cool open source app. Then some megacorporation comes along, removes all your claims of credit, adds 10% more code, compiles it, and distributes the executable binary locked up in DRM. Under the GPL, you could retain your own lawyer or appeal to the FSF to sue them and force them to open up their application. But without copyright enabling you to dictate licensing terms such as the GPL, you have no legal recourse. They get away with it and the worst they suffer is some bad publicity... maybe.
Would that theft of your work act as a disincentive to creating more works? Would you say to yourself, "why bother slaving away to create this when some megacorporation can just steal it, put their name on it, and lock it up in DRM"? Perhaps you would. Perhaps you wouldn't. But some people would and that would take more creators out of the market and lower the quantity and quality of content that's available.
Those who hold up the GPL, Creative Commons, or any licensing option other than the public domain as an alternative to copyright are expressing a preference for allowing creators to exert some control, however small, over how their work is used and distributed. But if you abolish copyright, you take away even that small element of control.
Now we can argue until we're blue in the face over the details of what copyright should allow and should not. The extension of copyright terms, the constant chipping away at the doctrine of Fair Use, the evils of DRM... these can all be cited as things that are wrong with current copyright law and things that need to be abolished. But that's reforming copyright, not abolishing it. It's surgery on the patient, not euthanasia.
If you support the GPL, support an author's right to dictate any terms regarding how their work is used, then you support the concept of copyright even if you don't support the current law and practice of copyright. Then the argument becomes not whether copyright should be abolished, but what form it should take. In short, we've established what kind of girl you are. Now we're just haggling over the price.
Not all who advocate the GPL would advocate the abolishment of copyright, Greg. I, for one, quite heavily advocate the GPL, but I also firmly believe that an author should definitely retain control over when and how his work gets copied after he publishes it. The terms of the GPL do this, as you pointed out. I _DO_ also maintain that there should be a limitation on such control with respect to time, and I find the concept of an indefinitely extensible copyright abhorrent.
You do a great job of ignoring the fact that the GPL is only necessary because software copyright exists. The GPL exists to create a body of work that can never be shackled by the usual restrictions of copyrighted works.
The GPL essentially circumvents the idea of copyright. The fact that it depends on copyright law to be enforceable is irrelevant. If software could not be copyrighted, the GPL would be completely obsolete. There is nothing hypocritical about using the GPL while campaigning for the abolishment of software copyright. In fact, the GPL is a good idea, because it shows that a free-software ecosystem would not be the end of the world, or even the end of capitalism.
Anonymous,
Public domain circumvents copyright. The GPL only circumvents traditional licensing models. It still requires the distribution of source code with any binary and the opening up of the source of any enhancements to the code when the application or library is distributed.
Get rid of copyright... people can compile the binary, lock it up with DRM, and distribute nothing but the binary and the DRM.
I'm not arguing against the GPL. I'm saying that the people who support it and want to abolish copyright are shooting themselves in the foot, because without copyright, the social good created by the GPL's requirement to share source code goes away. The abolishment of copyright removes any legal way to require people to share or distribute the source code of the original project or their enhancements to it.
"Then some megacorporation comes along, removes all your claims of credit, adds 10% more code, compiles it, and distributes the executable binary locked up in DRM."
Which I could then crack with impunity since no copyright means no legal penalty for cracking DRM-protected content. I could then take their 10% additional code to do whatever *I* want with, e.g. run it through a decompiler, add it to my source base, and republish it.
DRM is a bit of a straw man here. The fact that nobody has so far been able to come up with uncrackable DRM does not lead me to believe that they'd suddenly be able to do so in an environment where the major disincentive for spending time cracking DRM schemes (landing in court over it) has gone away.
Steve,
Something to think about...
What if we strengthened fair use rights and abolished abusive DRM rather than abolishing copyright and playing cat and mouse with DRM forever more?
Can you honestly believe an ever-escalating war between DRM creators and DRM crackers is going to be good for consumers?
If you abolish copyright, you all but guarantee that war. If you reform copyright, you can put an end to DRM.
Right on. It's all about balance. : )
I've always had a personal preference for BSD style licenses for the projects I work on. I am not convinced that Copyleft matters nearly as much as GPL advocates generally insist but they are certainly free to choose it for their own projects.
It would be nice to see the copyleft provision of GPL licenses expire after a fixed known period of time and leave products with a residual license with BSD terms. If copyright terms had not been continually extended beyond their original 14 year terms then this behaviour would already be enforced. Instead the term of copyleft clauses is currently indefinite.
I believe that GPL authors should be considering how long they want copyleft to apply to their creations, keeping in mind that after 5-10 years removing copyleft may serve to enhance and extend their contribution without the fear, which in my opinion is mostly unfounded, that their work is going to be exploited in a proprietary way.
I'm a little suprised at the length of this debate. The notion that copyright Will be reformed or abolished is unrealistic at best. Us vs. multi-billion dollar corporations that comprise the backbone of our economy (if I could exponentially pluralize 'corporation' I would) -- who wins?
I think you are misinterpreting what people want. Most people do not want to "abolish copyright" and all control over peoples works. Instead, I think most people want to see an end to traditional copyright practices. People are tired of never ending, limitless control that is renewed everytime Mickey Mouse is about to fall into public domain.
[...] Patients not Copyright are the problem 6 05 2007 I normally go threw slashdot to see if there are any interesting articles that I should actually read. Normally I don’t read any but a very interesting one caught my eye today. That being this article on people that advocate GPL and copyright. This article I found to make some very valid points about what people think about copyright. [...]
The view that copyright should be abolished is 100% compatible with the view that the GPL is a good thing. One would just need to believe that the benifit of the GPL is outweighed by the damage done by copyright in general.
I'm not sure that I actually hold that opinion, but I do hold the opinion that copyright protection that lasts more than 15 years and applies to personal copying *absolutely is* worse than no copyrights would be. Oh, and if you want credit for your work - get that passed as a law - creditright is very different conceptually from copyright.
As for the instance of corporations locking up an open source app, it's a matter of economics and publicity. Sure the corporation can put its DRMed copy out there, but the open solution is clearly preferable to anyone who does research. As popular as the locked up solution gets, if the OSS author can get word out enough (which should theoretically not be too difficult in these days of Digg), then the open solution would at the very least ride on the coattails of any popularity the locked solution enjoyed, and more likely if well-informed opinions became widespread enough result in a rather embarrassing situation for the company as their product is inherently less desirable than the open and free solution.
If copyright were abolished the GPL could still exist. It would have to be rewritten as a contract, but that is it.
"If copyright were abolished the GPL could still exist. It would have to be rewritten as a contract, but that is it."
The GPL is already a contract. When you accept a license, you enter into a contractual relationship with the licensor.
But if copyright were abolished, no one would have to accept that contract. They could copy and redistribute your content, code, etc. and not honor the GPL.
"But if copyright were abolished, no one would have to accept that contract. They could copy and redistribute your content, code, etc. and not honor the GPL."
Not if one were required to accept that contract before receiving a copy of the code, and to require others to accept the contract before redistributing to them. That said, that's not the way things would be done in your typical copyright abolitionist's utopia.
RMS, for instance, believes that the ability to share and modify source code is effectively a civil right, and thus that even without copyright, those abilities should be guaranteed by law. (The GPL was thus created as a workaround for the existence of copyright and nonexistence of laws making "software hoarding" illegal).
I think that abolishing copyright is an extremely stupid idea, but also that its proponents are inaccurately caricatured by this essay.
The GPL would not go away if copyright was abolished. Nor would any other software license agreement. License agreements are contracts. People may enter into them at their will regardless of copyright law.
Copyright law merely provides the default legal base around which parties must contract. As such, it primarily affects the transaction costs associated with using someone else's work.
Current copyright law places the majority of that transaction cost on the consumer, because all creative works are presumed to be copyrighted from the moment of creation. Therefore, to use someone else's work, a consumer must go to the (often considerable) effort of locating the copyright holder and obtaining permission (usually in the form of a contract, e.g. license agreement).
Without copyright law, this default would simply be turned on its head. The default presumption would be that creative works are freely usable and distributable, unless the creator contractually limits the ability of a consumer to the contrary. This policy would effectively shift the burden from the consumer (to prove that he has permission to use a work), to the creator (to prove that he has restricted the use of his work).
Some people (proprietary software vendors) don't like copyright because it isn't restrictive enough, so they contractually require their users to agree to more stringent terms (license agreements).
Other people (Creative Commons, GPL advocates) don't like copyright because it is too restrictive, so they contractually agree to give up some of their rights to others (license agreements).
Of course, enforcement is also different, because copyright is a strict liability criminal offense, which gives it much sharper teeth than a civil contractual matter.
So... what would change in software licensing in a world without copyright? Open source collaboration would be easier, because by default all software would be freely reusable.
Proprietary software companies would still be able to sell software, by requiring users to agree to a license. It might say, "in exchange for the right to use this software, you agree not to redistribute it."
Free software zealots could continue to encourage GPL principles, by requiring users to agree, for instance, "in exchange for the right to use this software, you agree that you will not limit anyone else's ability to reuse it or any derivative works that you distribute."
The legal recourse for violating either contractual provision would be a civil suit rather than a criminal action, and the creator would be required to prove that the consumer violated the contract.
To say that copyright is required for a creator to protect his work is legally inaccurate. If you created it, and you possess it, it is your property. If you don't want people to redistribute or copy your work, simply do not give it to them without the contractual stipulations needed to retain the property rights you wish to retain for yourself.
Perhaps you haven't read this opinion on why copyright should be abolished... it certainly changed the way I think about copyright: http://www.questioncopyright.org/node/1
Our advocacy for removal of copyright law also come with an additional requirement that source code is available on request similar to what GPL does. Like what you said, a simple removal of copyright law does more harm than not.
In the current world, we have a brunch of GPL'd libraries, and we will need to be GPL'd if we use any of them. Using GPL allows us to use this library, at the cost of revealing the public access to source code. Going open source brings advantages as well as disadvantages, especially that you cannot vendor-lock-in like your competitor does.
In the utopia, we will not have to make this trade-off. Everyone have to release source. As a result, everyone can use those "GPL'd" libraries. Everyone will not reinvent the wheel, because all software released will immediately be reusable by other parties.
The major question is whether we will have at least the same level of innovation in the utopia than the current world.
@Greg: The GPL is NOT a contract. To see this, just read what what the FSF lawyer wrote about it:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/enforcing-gpl.html
Where exactly have you seen those "Copyright Abolitionists"? Because I'm yet to find one.
As a proponent of free software and free speech I DO defend the Copyright! However, there are two things that I'd rather not have in the Copyright law:
1 - DRM protection - Because I think that tinkering with the content should be one of my fair use rights so long as I don't redistribute copies of either the original or the modified works without permission from the author (and this is where distribution licenses such as those used by free software come in);
2 - Transmissibility - Because I believe that authors should ALWAYS be able to benefit from their work regardless of who is licensed to distribute it.
-- Choom
I generally am for minimal IP controls. I use the FDL and CC licenses on a regular basis, being a content creator and not a coder. It all comes down to preference. The author of a given work should be allowed to decide what terms the work may be used under.
I prefer not having to curtail my use of someone's work, which is why I am OK with others using my own content with at least minimal attribution. Doing anything else would make me a hypocrite. To avoid the libertarian cliche, I'm for anything that's peaceful and voluntary. Don't pass a law about something- convince others to follow your brand of copyright (or lack thereof) on a voluntary basis. Who could ask for more?
I agree.
This is one of the reasons the Pirate Party in Sweden, one of the leading organisations for copyright reform in the world, argue that copyright should be reformed only to cover copying for commercial reasons, and that that copyright term should be reduced to only cover around 5 years after the creation of the work, as opposed to death of the author + 70 years, as it is today. We don't want to abolish copyright, we just want it to be restored to its original purpose.
People like Richard Stallman still oppose us, partially because that'd mean GPL:ed software could be gobbled up into commercial software, like you describe, after those five years, and partially because proprietary software creators would not be obliged to release their source code after the five year term. We still think it's a fair balance, and that five year old code is old enough to be re-used for any purpose by anybody.
Per von Zweigbergk
Pirate Party of Sweden
I agree with the view that being against copyright and for the GPL are not inconsistent.
At the end of the day, copyright was setup as a way of shoehorning a plentiful resource, IP, into a scarcity paradigm - capitalism. The only reason copyright needs to exist at all is because economists are too stupid to come up with a better way of rewarding the producers of IP when that resource is infinitely abundent.
I don't buy the argument about giving creators control over what they produced. If they are putting their work out in public, it should be reworked. The only caveat I would make is that they should be able to stop someone else exploiting their work without adding value of their own - and that gets back to the stupidity of economists problem.
W/R/T Comment 19:
While it is true that "license != contract" in the strictest sense, it also remains quite true that one can use contracts to enforce one's property property rights, which was the point of my post.
The reason software licenses are NOT contracts is because, as the author of the GNU article correctly points out, a license is not voluntary (and contract formation requires voluntary bargaining). Without the license, a user would have no use rights, because *copyright law* makes it a *crime* to use someone else's creative work without permission.
As the GNU article also points out, current license agreements tend to include contractual terms already, so it is not necessarily "wrong" to call a license a contract; most EULAs are both. The only distinction between the contractual terms and the licensing terms is the legality of the underlying behavior being regulated.
Thus, if copyright law did not exist (that is, if it were legal to use someone else's work without their permission), the agreement between the creator of the work and its consumer WOULD be a contract.
The question posed by this article is: "what would happen to (open source) software without copyright?"
My fundamental answer remains unchanged: if copyright did not exist, people would use contracts to control the rights to their property, as they do in countless ways already.
Copyright or patent, the concept of Intellectual property is the antisocial. The ownership of an idea is the repression of knowledge!
How far would you take owning an idea Greg?
Would you kill for it?
Would you deprive your fellow man of liberty for it?
Would you fine for it?
Now we know what kind of girl you are...
:p
W/R/T comment 19:
Also see this excellent LWN article expounding on the technical differences between licenses and contracts (they are very similar).
http://lwn.net/Articles/61292/
Without copyright, the GPL would not be *NEEDED*. Please continue to support free software! http://gnu.org
[...] Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Sometimes brains are a bad thing. I want to point out a few things to anyone who finds reason in what the author of the linked article has to say. He wants to try and convince you of some things. Read his article, then come back here. GNU/GPL and GNU/LGPL adopters are not all out to banish copyright. We just want to get copyright and anything to do with it out of our computers. [...]
Whole article is unfortunately a strawman, as 99% of those who you would group as wanting to "abolish" copyright actually mean "abolishing the major parts of it as applied to current IP"... I doubt anyone who has thought about it much would propose a simple deletion of copyright law.
Of course, you are right to point out that "abolish copyright" is too simplistic a viewpoint, but likely nobody is really arguing for that.
If copyright went away, companies would be clawing at the seams of pretty well all of the best GPL'd software there is and taking whatever they wanted and incorporating it into their own closed source projects for distribution. They may not be able to stop people from copying these new projects without copyright, but that wouldn't really mean anything to the authors of the original software whose code these companies have taken and blatantly used without any regard for the original intent of trying to benefit the computing community at large with open source software that people can learn from and improve with the improvements going directly back into the community.
Nonsense. The argument is: abolish copyright. Given copyright, use the GPL. See? Simple as that.
The idea of connecting a bit of work with a person is fine, it's just the current Intellectual Property system that should be abolished. It's possible that GPL would have to be re-thought, but I don't think we should prepare to drink the bathwater just to save the baby.
There's a better way. GPL seems to be a way to make copyright more palatable. Take away one and the other might not be so necessary.
Copyright, patents and DRM are needed to ensure that authors get rewarded for their work, for example:
Copyright: Who would spend months writting a book or a song, if afterwards they couldn't charge for it? Definetly not the vast majority of authors and we would be deprieved of most (if not all) of the content we enjoy. By allowing anybody to freely copy anything, you would, in effect be making it impossible for anybody to sell their work. Why would you go to "iTunes" if you could just as easily go to "freeTunes" and download *exactly* the same product for free? Which studio would spend millions producing the next blockbuster only to make it freely available?
Patents: Which pharmaceutical company would spend billions developing the new wonder drug, if afterwards all of its competitors could just copy it? It would make much more sense for *ANY* company to simply wait for some other to do the work for them and then proceed to profit from it...
DRM (or any other type of RM): Ensures that whoever has rights over a given content can enforce them. It's what is responsible for ensuring that if you try to *steal* my work you will be punished for it. Of course this doesn't mean that I agree with all the DRM schemes out there. If you pay for some content, you should be able to enjoy it any way you want, but it does not mean that you can freely distribute it thus keeping me from benefiting from it.
Of course, one could argue that in some type of uber-comunist utopia, none of this would be necessary. Alas, that is not the real world, and not everybody can afford to live inside their own head. For some reason people believe that stealing is ok, if it's "only bytes"... and seem to forget that in the future most of the content and technological developments will be "only bytes".
GPL is, as the post author clearly points out, just another form of copyright. One in which the owner of the work specifies what can and cannot be done with his/her work. Defending GPL and criticising copyright is nothing more than pure hipocresy.
Actually, you could easily support and promote the GPL while being anti-copyright. Sort of like using your enemies weapons against him.
"If you support the GPL, support an author's right to dictate any terms regarding how their work is used, then you support the concept of copyright even if you don't support the current law and practice of copyright."
This does not follow. You could easily see yourself as doing something that while not right, is the best choice available to you under the circumstances.
"But without copyright, the GPL could not be enforced."
Now this you have right, (well all authors could possibly use contracts, trade secrets, and possibly NDAs to try and get back to something like what we have now if there were no copyright laws) and I do think that a good number don't quite take this fact into consideration.
"If you support the GPL, support an author's right to dictate any terms regarding how their work is used, then you support the concept of copyright even if you don't support the current law and practice of copyright."
Even this doesn't quite follow.
Here is sort of how I see things. (Off the cuff.)
You write a book. You have not yet published it. No one has a right to publish it without your permission or to make copies etc.
You then publish it. As a natural right, the public then has rights to copy it and build upon it freely. Done.
Now, if the public decides that it would be in hteir best interests to suspend their rights for a time to fund the creation of new works, they can do so.
The rights the author gets under such a plan are not natural rights though.
I think that we might be better off with no copyright laws at all than with what we have today.
I think that we may be better off with some sane copyright laws than with no copyright law.
Some initial thoughts to spur discussion for those interested:
http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/2007/04/some-thoughts-on-copyright-offensive.html
"Public domain circumvents copyright."
While copyrights exist, public domain does not circumvent copyright at all. If you could not build copyrighted works from public domain works it would.
all the best,
drew
You are absolutely right. I consistently oppose the GPL and the copyright, but few people bother with consistency these days.
I'm a copyright abolitionist.
Anyone who thinks you need copyright in order to force people via the GPL to release their source code (ipso facto, supporters of the GPL must be supporters of copyright) hasn't thought things through very hard.
Check out this mailing list thread here where I attempt to explain:
http://freeculture.org/pipermail/discuss/2007-February/000996.html
http://tinyurl.com/2qrr73
The whole point of the GPL is to subvert copyright by forcing everyone to play on our terms. If copyright is eliminated, then the subversion of it via the GPL is not necessary. Yes, copyright is the foundation of the legal power of the GPL, but saying that makes the GPL reliant on copyright misses the point entirely. Without copyright we wouldn't need to enforce the GPL, even though we couldn't!
The example given, of locking a work under DRM simply can't happen: your work is still available, and, being DRM free, is automatically superior to the DRM version. (Without even getting into the fact that DRM doesn't work without copyright either).
Without copyright there would be no need for the GPL and both Free Software and Open Source Software movements would go on largely unchanged.
There two completely separate ideas:
* using copyright to enforce freedom of free software (and free information)
* abolishing the mere possibility of such information to be legally hidden
These two ideas are NOT in contradiction. Step 1 is good enough for many people in the Open Source community and some people in the Free Software community, but Step 2 is ultimately the final solution - abolishing copyright and patents is the thing that changes the playing field. It gives you the free software as a granted thing, as a commodity opening the world of new possibilities in the process.
So - yes, if we abolish copyright and patent law the Open Source as we know it will also disappear, giving way to something even better and larger.
The problem is that 90% of Open Source projects that gain any widespread adoption are just copying a commercial product (OpenOffice, Linux etc) to avoid paying said original creators. It's like Turkish Star Trek without the suck.
Without the commercial product that people want to use, very few people (per capita) would be whining about such things. So just realize what the real goals are here: Free access to commercial applications without the liability.
Without copyright, no one is willing to invest the kind of money it takes to develop radically new things in this day and age, no matter how rightfully anti-corporate you are. Period.
Of course it is also possible to abolish copyright, patents and drm and at the same time make it illegal to withhold specs/source code for hardware and software that you sell/propagate or in some other way make the GPL unnecessary.
Copyright should *not* be abolished, what *SHOULD* be abolished is the concept of "Intellectual property" -- that concept is an oxymoron if there were ever one: IP suggested that you can own an IDEA. I believe that both copyright and patents should be protected, HOWEVER we need to enforce what both were meant to do and limit them to the original time periods they were given, after which they expire. As for patents any application for a patent should include a *WORKING COPY" of the invention, otherwise it can't receive a patent. ANY software patent must not only supply a WORKING COPY of the program, but must also show that the ideas contained in the software are *ORIGINAL* and not found in prior art, or an extension of either a simple idea or an idea in the "wild" (by which I mean an idea currently being used but which has no patent protecting it).
Like patents copyrights should be protected, but like patents, they to should expire after their time limits are up.
In short, we need to get rid of the idea of "intellectual property" and overhaul both both the patent office and restrict copyrights to the original intent. Currently both have merged into the amorphous concept of "intellectual property law" and that law is not meant to protect *ORIGINAL* ideas but rather as a vehicle for litigation.
[...] Should copyright be abolished? [...]
what is more important is whether you can copyright publications about how to publish. for example, can the knowledge of publishing be suppressed so that it is only available to people with money? definitely not!
in addition, there should be no copyright on materials to learn foreign languages, although hindering the open publication of such materials should be deterred. nobody who professes the virtues of freedom of speech, yet speaks in a foreign language, can deny you the right to understand their language. period.
this could prevent alot of misunderstandings.
The GPL does add restrictions to distribution of a work but these restrictions only prevent you from adding more restrictions. If no one has the right to restrict the distribution of derrived work then what other restrictions do you need?
I am not convinced by the vision of a world without copyright you give in this article. You say:
"some megacorporation comes along, removes all your claims of credit, adds 10% more code, compiles it, and distributes the executable binary locked up in DRM"
If there is no copyright anybody who saw the source code would be able to redistribut it perfecetly legally.
Your argument relies on them being able to keep secrete the source code of something they are distributing (remember that the GPL does not require you to distribute the source to modifications you do not distribute).
I don't believe this would be possible. Any of the employees who came across it would be able to share it.
If the source code is not secrete then anyone can share it and so the situation is essentially the same as if you had GPL'd it.
I also think the megacorporation's bussiness model of selling something people are free to share and relying on DRM is unworkable. This is essentially what the record industry is trying and it isn;t working for them. It is so easy for people to share music and so hard to catch people (only a tiny minority are caught) that copyright might as well not exist on music. I don't believe anyone buys CDs because they can't get the music.
You're all nitpicking and saying "yes it does" -- "no, it doesn't".
Richard Stallman himself has said that the GPL's intended effect is to reverse copyright, and thus its effect is aptly called copyleft. Period.
Whether you are a copyright abolitionist or not, is irrelevant to the fact that the contemporary copyright regime is actually hindering progress instead of encouraging it.
And, if copyright were abolished and a megacorporation elected to grab your work and repackage it for sale without freedoms... it still wouldn't be theft. Come to think of it, even if copyright WEREN'T abolished, it still isn't theft today. Theft is what happens when I take an object from you and you no longer have it, and as such can only arise from rivalrous goods, definition that excludes works of art.
Read "Free Culture"
The ideal situation is copyright that lasts something like 5 years and then the author or his estate is required to register their intent to keep it copyrighted every 5 years. Fee - $1. Thus if he/she couldn't go through the trouble of re-registering for ONE DOLLAR, they must not care if it falls into Public Domain.
The fact that Disney and the other media companies were founded on PD and copyright infringement themselves makes this thing laughable - or it would if it weren't so tragic. For the full story read "Free Culture"
so i'm supposed to worry that a free application got stolen by a company, added crappy code to it, and then charged for it? who in their right mind is going to use it? who isn't going to find out that someone else made this first app thats DRM free or what-not?
do you know the FOSS community at all?
The title of this blog is misleading, since it's main content is attacking *some* people that support free software and abolishing of copyright.
Also the point made has been demolished previously.
Now, the idea of abolishing copyright is an interesting one, and I'd like to continue about it in some better medium (not blog comments).
I personally am FOR abolishing copyright and making DRM forbiden, but that may be an too big of a jump, today.
But a copyright reform is surelly needed.