Re:All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US publ...
by kragen on Wednesday December 08, 2021 @04:37PM
(#29490856)
> Copyright affects a lot more people that the vanishingly few who are lucky enough to experience instant success.
Right, that's why we're trying to find ways to limit the damage it does to everybody else.
The GPL-vs.-BSD flamewar you're trying to start is only mildly relevant. The various BSD and Apache contributors aren't campaigning against the use of their code by Apple and Microsoft, either. The point is that there's nothing wrong with going out and making derivative works of other people's creative work; it's how all creative work is done.
Torvalds is in a whole different situation. Public domain is very different than GPL. Linux probably wouldn't be what it is today if not for the GPL requirements to publish source, which don't exist under public domain.
In fact, that's a scary consequence I didn't initially think of -- in a world where copyrights on Linux have expired, we'll may very well see contributions drop dramatically as the largest contributions start to closed-source their branches of Linux.