3 ms·

Without copyright protection, it would be pretty easy to interfere with two of the Four Freedoms.

• thyrsus 14y ago
  Without copyright protection, there would be less incentive to interfere with any of the freedoms. Imagining a lack of copyright on software, the two reasons I can think of to eschew sharing are to keep for oneself/one's group an advantage provided by the program (whether that be a better search algorithm or a better nuclear weapon simulator) or to prevent exposure of assumptions made by the software to a competitor/adversary (e.g., avoid illegitimate SEO, security through obscurity). The advantages of sharing would remain: everyone with more access, a larger number of people to help improve the software. The pro-copyright claim is that the current system provides incentives for more software to be built than the absence of copyright would; but that's an economic model without experimental validation and not even as reliable as tested economic models (e.g., Keynesian stimulation/damping).