On one hand I agree with you, if I can build the same software you can, I should be able to sell it all the same. On the other, if there's no copyright or similar, what stops theft of source code and an identical program with fresh branding?

> I should be able to sell it all the same

No, you should be compensated for your labor. This does not entail a market product.

How will your system compensate people who write useful code if that code isn't allowed to be an excludable market product?

So only the first company to make a search engine should be able to sell a search engine? I don't see how this stance makes any sense.

No, selling a search engine never made any sense to begin with. Services should be publicly funded and freely accessible. As a bonus we wouldn't have to put up with spam on every site on the internet.

Kagi sells a search engine and it's hugely popular. They're supported by the people who buy the software, not by ads. Not selling the software is exactly what leads to the spam you hate. In similar vein, would you say all software should be given away freely?

I'm saying services should be publicly funded and freely accessible.

I assume op means you should be compensated through a method other than pretending software is scarce and trying to assign value to it through a system that relies on equivocating scarcity with value.

Does ownership of books make sense? What is the difference between code and books? Code is translated to machine code, just like books can be translated to other languages.

You own the medium the content is contained in (for books, the paper). Not the content itself. You do not get to copy the books content and place it in another container and sell the new container as though the content within it was yours to distribute in the first place.

I own my hard drive too, not sure how that's any different than paper.

And we can't ignore that ebooks exist.

You do own your hard-drive.

That doesn't mean you own any software or ebooks obtained by ill-gotten means. Nor does it mean you can replicate and sell an application, as though it was your own, that you paid a licenses or rental fee for. But you still own your hard-drive and are free to erase it and sell it.

I fully agree. Limiting the amount of copies of software to sell them like a finite good has so many downsides:

1. There may be people who cannot use/afford some software, although there is technically an infinite supply.

2. Collaboration becomes awkward. Either all contributors give up their rights (Open Source), or one contributor holds all the rights and the rest is being treated unfairly. The latter decreases the incentives to make software modular and reusable.

3. The resulting software typically gets worse due to some copyright enforcement mechanisms. For example, no closed source software will ever have a good debugger, because that would allow viewing and changing the source code.

4. It creates a power imbalance between software owners and software users. Nearly all software has to be adapted over time, but the software owner has a monopoly on performing such adaptations. The result is enshittification, surveillance, and basically a return to feudalism where daily life is governed by a small number of overlords.

5. It is not clear how to price software fairly, and there is also little incentive to do so.

6. My impression is that high-quality software converges to formal proof, which is AFAIK not copyrightable.

For all these reasons, I think it is time to consider a world without copyright on software.

To those that worry about salaries in such a world: Negotiate payment in advance (contracts, crowdfunding, bounties, ...), or get a job where software is created as a byproduct (consultant, researcher, tester, ...).