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Without copyright, there would be no legal basis for a Free Software license such as the GPL. I think having some kind of copyright is rather important, as long
by andreasvc 15y ago
Without copyright, there would be no legal basis for a Free Software license such as the GPL. I think having some kind of copyright is rather important, as long as it isn't unfairly biased towards corporations etc.
- pessimizer 15y agoWithout copyright, there would be no need for the GPL.
- JulianMorrison 15y agoGPL can do one thing that "without copyright" can't: protect derived works from becoming "trade secret" (unprotected, but published as binary only). Still not worth it.
- dredmorbius 15y agoIt takes far less copyright than we currently have to make the GNU GPL effective. In fact, when the GPL was first proposed in the mid 1980s, copyright was much less draconian than it is now. The irony is that the GPL's ju jitsu turns copyright's strength on itself -- the stronger the protections of copyright, the stronger the terms of the GPL. And so long as copyright is about allowing authors and publishers to set terms for the distributions of their works, this will be the case. The GPL is just a case of a particularly philanthropically minded author/publisher.