> If software were uncopyrightable, they would still be binaries without source code, which you would have to reverse engineer to find out what harm they perpet

> If software were uncopyrightable, they would still be binaries without source code, which you would have to reverse engineer to find out what harm they perpetrate actively or possibly through their security flaws. True. But reverse engineering could happen openly, and tooling for it would improve. The benefits would outweigh the costs. > if you wrote a piece of free source code, anyone could do anything with it they wish, including removing your name, and not attributing you in any way in the documentation accompanying the compiled code. Depends where you are. Many jurisdictions recognise attribution as a "moral right" separate from copyright. > A program is not distributed to you if someone else installed it on a machine you don't own and you're just borrowing that machine. It doesn't matter if you're physically at the console, we're at a remote dumb terminal or smart client. The program was distributed to your school, company or friend or whoever. Up to a point. If you pressed the "buy" button, paid the money, and are using it from your machine like a program, then it shouldn't matter where it's metaphysically located. Plenty of software will "phone home" to company servers or even falsely claim to be running computation on the company's machines (SimCity), but that doesn't mean the software hasn't been distributed to you. Just as the courts don't allow you to stream TV from an OTA capture card in a remote datacenter and consider that to be OTA viewing, having a program that you use from your local machine do some of its execution in some remote datacenter (whether through VNC-style remote access, a web UI, or something else) shouldn't make it any less your program that's been distributed to you and that you're using.