The status quo and abandoning copyright aren’t the only alternatives. It would also be possible to reform copyright. One obvious change would be to shorten the time that a work can be copyrighted.

Like going back to the original 14 years?

Anything less than the current "infinite" would be a pleasant change.

> Anything less than the current "infinite" would be a pleasant change.

It's a long time, but it's not infinite. New works started entering the public domain again on January 1, 2019.

That's yet to be determined. Disney is a big influence on the length of US copyright protections.

Let's see what happens come 2024:

> On January 1, 2024, we'll see the expiration of the copyright for Steamboat Willie—and with it Disney's claim to the film's star, Mickey Mouse.

> That's yet to be determined. Disney is a big influence on the length of US copyright protections. Let's see what happens come 2024

I'm well aware of Disney's role in copyright law.

Disney's opportunity to do extend the term was before Dec. 31, 2018. That's how they extended copyright durations in the past - preventing any new works from entering the public domain at all. It's much harder for them to retroactively amend the copyright term now that some of those works have begun to enter the public domain.

For works released in someones lifetime the effective limit is effectively infinite for ~25% of people based on actuarial tables and assuming the best case of the author published it the year you were born and died that very same year. If the author died when the reader was 13 that's less than 50% who will ever live to that point.

If the author is anonymous(or work for hire) or lives for 20 years after they published the work then it is effectively infinite for ~91% of people assuming the best case.

Say what you want about the old 14+14 system but at least it would have meant that by the time you were a parent you could almost certainly share the works that were influential with you as a kid with your kids. With the current system you have to cross your fingers that it was popular enough to remain in print rather than moving to some limbo of unable to be acquired except 2nd hand or illegally.

I think that is too short for cultural reasons. I think it needs to be at least long enough that something new can come out during a person's childhood and become important to them, and still be under copyright when that person is an adult and has children of their own, so that they can introduce it to their own children. Maybe even long enough that this will work for grandchildren too.

Short terms can make that hard. For example, suppose your childhood thing was "Calvin & Hobbes". With a 14 year term that would be public domain by the time you are an adult, and I have no doubt that advertisers would have immediately conscripted Calvin to push toys and cereals ("It's even better than Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs") and such and saturated children's media with this.

So then you go to share with your kid what was your favorite comic strip when you were a kid, and they have no interest in a strip about the Kellog's and Mattel and such spokes character that they've been bombarded with already for years.

Maybe it is time to consider different terms for different copyright rights? Shorter term for the right to make and distribute literal copies, but longer terms for the right to make and distribute derivative works?

> so that they can introduce it to their own children

I must be missing something. Why is must something be under copyright in order for you to share it with your kids?

Not being under copyright doesn't stop you from sharing it with your kids. It just makes it less likely to be worth sharing it with your kids, for the reasons in the second and third paragraphs.

Wasn't it 14 with the option to renew once for an extra 14? That seems pretty reasonable to me.

Do you think practicing civil disobedience on copyright law will lead us to fixing it? It seems like the opposition is just digging its heels even further. In addition to fighting for their right to control distribution, they're also pushing for DRM, which is making things worse..

There will always be a crackdown. This is how entrenched power works. It happened with India and immolation and the Boston Tea party. Standing up for yourself means someone will always try to knock you down.

Ramifications of the Boston Tea Party: https://www.bostonteapartyship.com/the-aftermath

India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_Sati_Regulation,_1829

Err, are we on the same page here? I don't think so. Because I'm talking about copyright law. Comparing the morality of pirating a disney movie with opposing killing people is not a reasonable position. It cheapens the real struggle that people went through.

Comparing copyright to these situations probably turns more people away from your cause than it attracts.

How do we know that they wouldn't be doing all of those things and more in the absence of pushback?

Starting an argument with "Anything can happen" rarely gets us anywhere. We can only make do with what we know..

A big issue of reform was the switching costs. A number of countries specifically the Nordics and France, have very elaborate and somewhat successful systems for renumeration to publishers and (theoretically) authors. For these any shift to more lax rules risks upending the system in such major ways that they are opposed to it. So any EU reform faces a really uphill struggle, as the vetos are pretty much guaranteed.

Except that reforms that go the other way seem to be subject to majority votes in the council of ministers. [0]

[0] https://torrentfreak.com/eu-ministers-approve-copyright-dire...

I'd LOVE for that to happen. Just so we can finally see if it makes even the smallest change in piracy.

It seems almost certain that "piracy" would go down. Even if the only change was that people torrenting Firefly in 2019 would be doing so legally, that's that much less piracy.

Then you get the effect that everything from the 20th century becomes available on YouTube, which is likely to cause increased viewership of that content over newer content pirated or otherwise. Which I suspect is the main reason Hollywood is really against shorter copyright terms -- not just losing the revenue from past works but having to compete with them when they're free.

I'm also curious about this. Offhand I wouldn't expect it, since even the historical 14-year window is well past where most people buy or pirate a work. Of course, that also implies the time past 14 years isn't about giving creators time to monetize so much as letting a few behemoths protect their brands.

Not OP, but I'm against all forms of intellectual "property". So yeah, I'm not against "stealing" GPL code, from a legal standpoint.

I know I'm an extremist though(statistically speaking), even in this forum.

How do you propose people get paid for their work?

But you watch it. Read it. Play with it. You like doing those things? Do you pay for those things? Or download them for free?

Does it matter? Nobody loses a penny when you download it. Someone made it because they wanted to make it or got paid to make it. The rest is history.

> Someone made it because they wanted to make it or got paid to make it.

This is definitely not true when it comes to royalty-based models.

So, just as an hypothetical.. If it were impossible to pirate Windows, would all of those users switch to Linux or BSD or other free OSs?

If even a single user goes out and buys a license to Windows, then there is a definite argument to be made that piracy resulted in the loss of at-least one sale.

I don't contest that changes in the environment change purchasing behavior.

However, such wishful thinking has no place in my worldview. Either a sale happened or it did not and it never was. Again, you can't lose something you never had, and calling it a loss is just wordplay. Doubly so when it's only a loss if such and such had been so and so and yada yada. It never was. If you lost something, you go find it or call your bank and have them explain how the account now has less money than yesterday.

And yes, thanks to piracy, you might make fewer sales. I don't have a problem with that. I also don't have a problem with pepsi resulting in coca cola having fewer sales.

>Again, you can't lose something you never had, and calling it a loss is just wordplay.

Well, you can. We have entire legal systems dedicated to assessing economic harm based on similar hypothetical situations. For e.g. Loss of income due to injury.. loss of earnings due to defamation.. diminished earning capacity due to a handicap, etc, etc. You can't simply say - "it never was or you never had that money". All these things have well established economic and legal histories. I don't know if those are part of your worldview. If you wish to reject them, then be assured that you are well outside of mainstream economic and legal thought.

A loss is simply a reduction. I hope you realize that a positive claim that piracy results in zero loss of revenue, has to be substantiated. At best, you can claim "we don't know" and you might very well be right - we simply don't know exactly what would have happened. But that is not the same as saying - we know nothing. We can piece together a model based on basic economic principles of market value, supply and demand, opportunity cost, etc, etc. and come up with a reasonable analysis.

Yeah they did. They lost ROI.

If someone pirates a movie and watches it without paying, the movie studio loses ROI only to the same extent that they lose ROI when someone doesn't pirate it and doesn't watch it. Am I stealing ROI from the Detective Pikachu movie by not going to the cinema to watch it?

But when a person has the option of watching a pirate copy vs. a paid copy, then there is a loss. To extrapolate— if everyone only used pirate copies, who would finance movie production or music production or book publishing?

> To extrapolate— if everyone only used pirate copies, who would finance movie production or music production or book publishing?

If everyone only pirated, it would mean nobody valued that stuff enough to sustain it. If people doesn't value it, let it die. Can you imagine a world where nobody values movies or music or books? I can't. And therefore I can't see them dying, no matter what. So this concern is irrelevant to me.

I'm not sure why I would need to come up with ways to finance the production of goods that people don't want to pay for. Going back to my previous example, I have no idea how the Detective Pikachu movie would get financed if everyone in the world had the same lack of interest in it as I do. But I also wouldn't be too upset if no one was interested in a Detective Pikachu movie and it never got financed and produced.

They never had it in the first place. You can't lose something you never had.

At one end of the spectrum, everyone pays to see every movie they want to see. The movie makers make bank and keep making movies.

At the other end of the spectrum, everyone pirates the movies they want to see. The movie makers stop making movies because they won't make money on them.

In between the two ends is a large grey area. Pretending that it's always acceptable to pirate any movie you want to see is akin to saying that you don't want the movie studios to make movies anymore. But pretending that every movie pirated costs the studios a ROI equal to the cost of buying the movie is disingenuous, too.

> The movie makers stop making movies because they won't make money on them.

Counterexample:

fanfiction.net 13'293'677 works

archiveofourown.org 4'825'000 works

fimfiction.net 125'797 works

[assorted forums and individual websites that make up the other half of my bookmarks] ? works

It looks like people will in fact make things even when they know - due to copyright law even - that they cannot make money on them.

Any creative work that will only get made if the authors think they can extort money from the people who benfit from it is a work that society is better off without.

> Pretending that it's always acceptable to pirate any movie you want to see is akin to saying that you don't want the movie studios to make movies anymore.

It is always acceptable not to watch a movie. Does that mean one doesn't want studios to make movies? No, they can still keep making movies if others care enough to keep them going.

This is just saying that movies will be produced in proportion to the amount of people who want to watch movies bad enough to actually subsidise their production.

The same exact mechanism is in play in music (fans who go to gigs & buy swag etc. subsidise music for the masses who hardly put a penny in it), and many other parts of the economy. Enthusiasts, companies with deep pockets, everyone who pours big money into research & bleeding edge tech subsidise the things that will ripple down to the rest of us with lower and lower margins, often in such a way that the original inventor/researcher/producer gets cut out of the loop in that market.

The market will correct itself so it's kinda pointless to hypothesize about a world where nobody wants to pay for a movie yet somehow everyone wants movies real bad.

I think fireworks are a good analogy. On New Year's eve, many people buy them and fire them, but others just go for a walk or watch the show from their window or roof.

The act of pirating the movie itself signals that there is some notional value to the downloaded content. Otherwise, you would just pipe 1GB of bits from /dev/random in to a file and play that.

And yet the pirate chose to pirate, so it did not have enough monetary value for them.

>The same exact mechanism is in play in music (fans who go to gigs & buy swag etc. subsidise music for the masses who hardly put a penny in it), and many other parts of the economy.

This is correct; income from services like Spotify are pitifully low. However, it highlights an important distinction between two types of movie piracy: cam-rips of movies currently playing in the theatre, and "normal" piracy, which is of stuff available through retail. The thing with music is that you can't pirate a live band performance: there's very rarely anything comparable to a cam. For one thing, too much of the value of a live performance comes from the experience. Second, it's usually too difficult to capture such a performance as an ordinary audience member. (Official recordings released after the tour are different, of course.)

While I, like some others here, don't believe in intellectual property at all, I do think that artists should be rewarded for their work. Until we can get a better system, I question the ethics of taking something for free when you are in a position to easily pay for something of equal or better quality. So I personally have never torrented anything that was playing in theaters, and I think that's a principle one could reasonably stick to.

However, I think there's a striking difference between what you might call "performance rights", and right to copy. In the latter case, while I think it still makes sense to give the artist some recompense for their success, the situation is in fact much different. Other people regularly make these points, so I'll only mention the top few most relevant for me:

* It's usually impossible to rent / purchase a movie at home at watch it instantly without DRM. Many movies aren't available for streaming at all.

* Quality is usually quite bad when streaming. Even if you get lucky and can get 1080p or above (which means you're not a Firefox or Chrome user watching Netflix), the encoding quality of the film is usually quite bad.

* Even if you have a video rental service nearby, and they have the movie you want to watch in Bluray, you then need to have a Bluray player to watch it (more DRM), as well as hope you have the latest AACS keys, or that your player can download them in a reasonable amount of time if you do not. (Even then there are quite often encoding problems on Blurays, which pirates take the time to fix more often than not.)

In other words, the value proposition of pirating retail products is pretty good. You can instantly (or nearly so) watch a larger selection of films in higher quality than you can get through any other means, with no technological limitations. I think in this case, the value of compensating artists is outweighed by the competing value of the incredible increase in convenience and quality that piracy represents to the public.

None of this is to say that compensating artists isn't important; the problem is that the current system for compensating them sets up a whole bunch of competing values. While your "fireworks" analogy probably works for films in theaters, it doesn't exactly capture the realities of the retail market for films. That reality is that we need a better system for distributing movies that makes it possible to compensate artists without neglecting other values.

On the third end of the spectrum, there's the crowdfunding model. Alternatively, we could only have "free non-commercial use" - so that if you make money from the movie (e.g. a movie theatre) you'd need to pay royalties... so people could either pay to see it in the cinema, or download free and watch at home... i.e. same as the de facto status quo. (Personally, I don't understand why people go to the cinema - I prefer to watch movies at home even if cinema was free - but some people still seem to like going...)

Yes because “crowd funding” is going to raise the $5 million it took to make “Get Out” let alone the $356 million it took to make “Avengers Endgame”.

Crowdfunding is not inherently limited in scale. If it can raise $5k $50k or $500k, there's no reason to think it couldn't raise $5M. Or even $350M for that matter. The reason these projects aren't being funded is because they're basically uneconomic to make in the first place; by forcing people to pay for content instead of releasing it for free (effectively a price floor!) the proprietary market has to compete by "gold-plating" the stuff and wasting away any potential gains in efficiency.

Compare U.S. airlines before deregulation got rid of the price floors there. Incredibly appealing service, with great waiting areas at the airport, gourmet meals in-flight, young attractive air-hostesses, and so on and so forth - but only if you could afford it in the first place! Behind all that luxury, we were actually seeing rampant wastage of resources.

I specifically called out “Get Out” for that reason. It definitely wasn’t “gold plated”. It was made on a budget of $5 million and grossed $285 million and got great reviews.

Look at Star Citizen, it has raised over 200 million now.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of crowd funding from the consumers perspective. It’s already 5 years late.

Sometimes I pay for them, when I consider that the product is really good and I want to support the author, and sometimes I download them for free.

Sometimes you dine and dash too, I suppose? If the food isn't really good or you don't want to support the restaurant?

Dine and dash is theft. Piracy is not.

Piracy exactly is theft. You prefer being called a pirate to being called a thief. You realize pirates are thieves right?

Is called piracy because it's theft.

I'm okay with people stealing GPL code to look at it with friends over a few beers and popcorn.

The GPL already doesn't prevent that kind of usage, so clearly that's not what the parent was talking about

My point is that the argument is a false dichotomy. We could very well legalize filesharing without making the GPL any weaker.

RMS himself is against the idea of intellectual property; it's just that copyleft is the closest you can get in a system that supports IP.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html

RMS's stance is that he is against the idea of 'intellectual property' as an umbrella term for copyright, patents, and trademarks, as it conflates three (or more) largely unrelated areas of law. This does not necessarily mean he is against any of these ideas per se.

Grabbed the wrong rant

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.htm...

My reading of the linked rant is that RMS is against lumping copyright, patents and trademarks under the umbrella of "intellectual property", but not against those things individually. I don't see anything there to support the idea that RMS is against the idea of copyright (that being the section of "IP" that the GPL most directly addresses).

Grabbed the wrong rant

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.htm...

The GPL is hijacking IP to create a consumer right to repair that should exist but doesn't.

Total IP abolition in combination with a strongly enshrined right to repair, which would necessitate access to source code of binaries given, would be perfectly in the spirit of the free software movement.

I would add that it RMS would actually prefer that over current GPL. GPL was created as a response to current IP laws trying to use it against itself.

I don't know that this is all-or-nothing.

The same law that protects people from stealing GPL code also protects movie studios from having their content copied and redistributed without permission. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the GPL family of licenses' restrictions on exactly how you can use GPL software are legally difficult to discern from media companies' efforts to restrict how we are allowed to consume their works.

But there are things that I suspect would be easier to disentangle. I wouldn't mind seeing some sort of provision where copyrighted works can more easily fall into the public domain when they've been abandoned by their copyright holders, for example. We could also stand to roll back some of the power grabs that media companies have managed to get codified.

FWIW:

What The Swedish Pirate Party Wants With Patents, Trademarks, And Copyright (2012):

> Copyright must be reformed. We’d like to keep the copyright monopoly for commercial use (but with shorter, more sensible terms of protection). The big problem is that copyright has expanded in the past 20 years, going from being something that only corporations needed to care about, into something that criminalizes the entire young generation (and more and more people who aren’t even particularly young anymore).

> The Swedish Pirate Party wants to; Legalize file-sharing and other non-commercial sharing [...] At most 20 years of protection from the publication of a work. [...] Registration after five years. [...] Sensible regulation for quotations, parodies, and remixes [...] A ban on DRM

http://falkvinge.net/2012/10/13/what-the-swedish-pirate-part...

Richard Stallman (2012):

> I agree with all three of these positions. I do suggest, however, that it would be better not to group together these three issues and only these three. Why would anyone group together these three unrelated laws? I suspect it reflects the mistaken concept of "intellectual property".

http://www.stallman.org/archives/2012-jul-oct.html#16_Octobe...

You can reform copyright without rendering the GPL unworkable. I asked Rick Falkvinge about this a number of years ago (2008-2010), and he seemed quite confident that the GPL would still be viable given their proposed reforms.

(Current Pirate Parties appear to use similar policies, such as Pirate Party UK:"A fair and balanced copyright regime that is suitable for the 21st century is an absolute necessity for the UK to remain competitive in a global economy that is built upon ideas and innovation. Copyright should give artists and innovators the chance to make money from their work; however, that needs to be balanced with the rights of society as a whole. We will work for copyright reform and reduce copyright terms to 10 years to balance everyone's needs." https://www.pirateparty.org.uk/policy/culture/home)

Copyright reform is not about burning copyright to the ground.

Burning copyright to the ground would be a significant improvement over the mess we have now. Artificial scarcity enriches a few at the expense of the many; hardly a desirable state of affairs.

This is true if you only consider the first order effect of copyright.

However, the second order effects would lead to, for example, significant decrease in investment of the creation of any work that has marginal production of near $0. Why would Disney/Marvel go to the effort of creating the Avengers movies when those movies could be shown freely by movie theaters? They, of course, would not as there would be no way to recoup their investments. Now the millions of "the many" who have freely exchanged their dollars for movie tickets are worse off. Nobody wins, not the few and not the many.

Why would GRRM write the next two works in ASOIAF if ANY publisher could take the text, print it and sell it without remuneration to GRRM? At best he would because he's already rich but would he ever have in the first place?

The winners in your world may very well be Amazon and others with the easiest/best distribution platforms at the cost of the creators and in turn at the cost of all as the creators no longer create.

We could transition into a model where works are crowdfunded before they are made by people who want them the most. Creators set the amount they want for their work and if there are enough people that wish to see the work it will get funded and will be free for everyone to enjoy without artificial scarcity.

Crowdfunding exists today. We don't see this model much at all and certainly not at the levels of quality or scale seen in for-profit, copyright/IP based enterprise. Why?

1) To gain a crowdfunding base of sufficient size to replace the current models and achieve the necessary budgets in the first instance would require massive marketing spend. This would HAVE to be forked over prior to obtaining funding and therefore represents a major risk because with crowdfunding, it's all or nothing.

2) Tragedy of the commons/freeloading. Why agree to pony-up when I can wait/hope for some other saps to do so?

3) Crowdfunding means paying for something that doesn't exist to be created and trusting that the creators can/will create it at a level of quality that matches what you expected from their pitch. But wait, you've already committed your resources to them. Why should they actually strive to create an optimal good when they get your money regardless of the quality? This is a huge problem with crowdfunding. In today's world, you can rely on word of mouth, reviews, previews, etc.

So, no, the proposed world would be much worse. The set of above reasons are really showstoppers, imo, and they don't even cover the full scope of the problems with your proposal.

> Why would Disney/Marvel go to the effort of creating the Avengers movies when those movies could be shown freely by movie theaters?

Maybe we could wait a bit for cool movies when technology advances to the point where they can be made by few dedicated people with off the shelf hardware instead hundred million budget that needs to be propped up with additional millions to trump up the hype so it can be earned back?

So many things made possible by copyright that we are accustomed to look like severe pathology when you look at them with fresh eye.

> Maybe we could wait a bit for cool movies when technology advances to the point where they can be made by few dedicated people with off the shelf hardware instead hundred million budget that needs to be propped up with additional millions to trump up the hype so it can be earned back?

We aren't far away from that, but it's important to remember that creators now have the option to create without attaching copyright to a work. Copyright isn't mandatory. Creators tend to choose copyright because it is in their best interest.

Also, it isn't mandatory to consume copyrighted media. Just find something else that isn't encumbered by it if you wish.

It also isn't mandatory to respect copyright. It's unenforceable and a lot of people ignore it happily.

> Creators tend to choose copyright because it is in their best interest.

And some peole choose to emit tons of CO2 because it's in their best intrest. The question is, is it in everybody's best interest.

A lot of people would be culturally poorer and more isolated if not for piracy and 100% secure copyrighted content wouldn't be as popular.

Copyright is not equivalent to climate change.

What does it mean to be culturally poorer? Attaching importance to pop culture knowledge sounds like the real problem.

Of course it is not. What I'm saying is, optimal economic decissions of some people might not be good for people in general. When it comes to copyright we can't consider only the good of the creators and people who paid creators.

Copyright is not just for popculture. Also learning materials, software and culture in general. Tonnes of people in the world got their higher education on pirated software and xeroxed books.

If your "fresh eye" take on copyright is "Hey man, one day just a few dedicated people will be able to do this and we should just wait til then because it will happen and those people will do it for free and it will be of equal or greater quality to what we have today or would have in the future regardless" without a clear path to that being a reality nor a clear argument for why these people will actually do that, then I'll stick with the "severe pathology" which to date is still clearly the best means through which resources are put to productive use.

Long live capitalism, free choice and property rights: the greatest human forces of all time; the creators of prosperity.

I appreciate the sentiment that leads one to such considerations, but really all I see with no copyright is that creators will be completely exploited and the only people making money from people's works will be corporations who lock stuff up with DRM, or with other IP, or sui generis licenses, or simply through physical gateways like only showing movies in cinemas. I don't see that this would lead to greater access to new media creations (though obviously past media would all be open to use).

Short copyright terms - someone mentioned 20 years max, with registration needed after 5 years. That sort of thing is better, far better than both longer copyright and no copyright.

The maximum term, IMO, should enable people to enjoy for free-gratis in their middle ages the media of their youth and build on that freely (libre) as inspiration to create cultural works for themselves and those that follow. Being able to have open, uninhibited access to one's own cultural inspirations well within one's working lifetime seems ideal to make sure that the demos get something worthwhile out of the deal.

Works restricted by DRM can't enter the public domain and so should be exempt from protection by copyright, though I'd allow some sort of deposit system whereby companies could put un-bound works in escrow, and so still be allowed to get copyright protections.

What you describe in the first paragraph seems like a detailed and accurate description of the current state of affairs, with strong copyright law essentially written by the large corporations you describe.

Anyone who is making a modest living producing their own original IP is not doing so because of IP protection laws, because they surely cannot afford to litigate (and they certainly can't afford to lobby to get the laws to favor them).

GPL is in the word of its author Richard Stallman a strategy to maximize the amount of users that can exercise liberty over their own life in regard to software.

I think it is a rather nice trade to give up GPL if we get in return the right to repair to deal with DRM and no copyright to allow for sharing and modifying software.

For my own part, outside of OS and security software, which I feel should be 100% monolithic and black box, I'm fine with the idea of all text and code of every program and file being available to anyone who may wish to improve it.

> For my own part, outside of OS and security software, which I feel should be 100% monolithic and black box, I'm fine with the idea of all text and code of every program and file being available to anyone who may wish to improve it.

Curious to hear why you think OS and security software should be black boxes and not open.

Because I don't trust anyone. I feel that human interference is a security problem that can't be overcome and should be reduced by every possible means.

By that same logic, you shouldn't trust the creators of the monolithic black box either. So you can't trust anyone, except yourself and the OS only you have access to.

In general, do you not find carrying this level of paranoia on a daily basis is simply oppressive to your own well being?

You're right. The preference would be that each person has access to a single part of the black box and no access to anyone or any other part of the whole shebang. Either that or the old way of dealing with people involved in things that have to remain secret. Of course, you behead enough OS devs and soon there won't be any.

As far as my daily life, no not really. I just live a life where I grant very few people a view into the things I consider private, and ensure that every two or three people know contradictory things without knowing the parts that put them together. It leads to a robust but distant social web.

> I grant very few people a view into the things I consider private, and ensure that every two or three people know contradictory things without knowing the parts that put them together

Sounds exhausting, I can't imagine using that much mental energy to keep up this web, but your life your rules.

What are the vectors you fear? If anything, an open OS makes vulnerabilities less of a commodity and more eyes = easier fixes.

The vectors I fear are the potentially malicious brains behind every pair of eyes. Why do you want to see my OS (or really any of my software)? The only reason I can think of is to have access to my files, or to hijack my machine and install customized ransomware as part of the OS. Therefore, any individual who sees any part of my OS that could grant them any access whatsoever to any part of my PC is an extreme and real danger.

But a vastly different spirit.

How so? "You are not allowed to use my work unless you agree to particular conditions that I care about".

In one case the condition is "I get paid", in the other "you have to contribute back your changes", but it's a similar underlying concept.

GPL is a way to ensure that this particular piece of software stays free forever. One thing that GPL definitely doesn't do is "you have to contribute back your changes", it's fully legal to modify and use GPL-based systems and not contribute any changes back; the only thing that GPL prohibits is enforcing copyright restrictions on others when (if!) I pass the software on to them.

In a legislative regime where all software is free, that goal is achieved without GPL so GPL isn't needed anymore; I get the permission to use, modify and redistribute all software as if I had received it with the GPL.

that's a gross mischaracterization of the situation.

copyright doesn't mean "i get paid", it means "i get to withhold" (see all the out-of-print books, abandonware, etc).

GPL does not mean "you have to contribute back your changes" at all: "The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any part of it. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them." https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLRequireSourc...

one is about taking access away (for whatever goal), the other is about taking that option away (for the benefit of users).

Well, the author of a work should be able to control certain key aspects of distribution. Either you agree or disagree. Anything else is just a special-pleading logical fallacy.

I don't think that's true at all. We can acknowledge qualitative differences and aims and indeed this "special pleading" is the foundation of all law - we select based on our own conceptions of what is right which laws to make; to say that it is special pleading is to say that laws against those actions which cause harm is special pleading - after all, what's so special about harm? Nevertheless, it is possible to imagine a world in which one restriction (or liberalization) is made but another is not. While this requires a competent legislature and judiciary, there is no reason to think it is impossible; the difficulty in making an analytic distinction is only a small speed bump.

Well, sure, thats all well and good in theory. How do you deal with existing laws though? Its hypocritical to tell someone to not "steal" GPL code, when you're downloading the latest Avengers movie yourself. I'm all for changing the law, but I don't agree with the approach that copyright law can only be fixed via civil disobedience.

You are creating a false dichotomy by using the word stealing in the first place.

If you accidentally take a picture of my shitty origami art project you are not stealing

If you walk into a factory and take the mold for a military sonar device you are stealing.

At what point does changing the first story into the second story does it become stealing?

Either you can pinpoint a minimal set of changes in which it becomes stealing OR 'stealing' vs 'not stealing' is insufficient to accurately describe a situation

Yes, stealing applies primarily to physical property or physical items of value. And the word hacker now has a second meaning with a negative connotation. Words outgrow their original meaning as the language evolves. I'm not advocating for the word 'steal' to be a legal definition of anything. I'm simply using it on an internet forum in a casual context.

The author already doesn't control all aspects of distribution. It's for example okay to use copyrighted works for satire in many legislations. So lawmakers already agree that there are legitimate uses of copyrighted works that are out of control of the copyright holder. If we wante to we could extend such uses to include filesharing.

Yes, and that would be good. Alls im saying is, follow the law, or change it, but don't advocate breaking it ;)

(I admit I too pirated music and sw during my college days, but I don't anymore..)

It isn't just the author personally controlling though. It is about using tax payer's money to do so.

As a society, we have generally agreed that the author has certain rights of control, and as a society (i.e. using taxpayers' money) we will enforce those rights on behalf of the author.

How is that different from society agreeing that it'll use taxpayers' money - through the police force, courts, etc - to uphold my right to keep control of my wallet, my car and my house, in the face of someone who might want to take them from me? My possession of these things is personal, yet society supports/enforces it when challenged.

GPL "abuses" copyright to prevent conveyors from closing off software from its users. make the provisions of GPL the law, and copyright of software can go.

Why would we want to make GPL the law? Any reduction in the scope of copyright is far more likely to move in the general direction of CC0 than GPL.

The reason GPL exists is because of current IP. Stallman believes in all source code being open and treated no different than a cooking recipe. GPL was created to use existing copyright laws to fight with proprietary software. So if we had no copyright, GPL wouldn't even be needed.

> Stallman believes in all source code being open and treated no different than a cooking recipe.

Not exactly. He doesn't want people modifying the recipe and keeping it a secret. Or atleast, not distributing food made from that recipe. (I know that analogy breaks down here.. but I tried!)

No. I'd rather have no GPL and no copyright.

But Stallman and the pirate party have come up with a pretty nice proposal in the end: a much shorter time limit on copyright that can be extended if you give more rights to the user.

BSD licenses wouldn't be required if copyright didn't exist.