Quote:
Originally Posted by zerospinboson
Now I know (most) authors are a touch more self-important than most F/OSS developers, (and Don Quixote and the Divine Comedy were also written before copyright was invented) so I don't really see the principled argument that teaches us that a world without copyright would not work.
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Copyright as a concept would live on, even if we abolish the law as it stands. It'd take the form of something else, and could possibly exist in worse form than it stands today.
The reason I believe the other poster brought up contract law is that if you abolish copyright, that is what people will fall onto in order to get protections for their work, as the two already work hand in hand (contracts are used to define what rights a copyright holder gives to someone who holds a copy, with a default 'contract' being built into copyright law, and restrictions on what a non-default contract can have).
There were two sides to copyright law initially: Offer up protections to encourage artists to produce a work knowing they can use it to fund their livelihood. And expire those protections so that the creator cannot use a single work to profit indefinitely, and encourage them to continue producing more while older work goes into the public domain.
The problem we face is that the second aspect of copyright law has gotten diluted and weak after copyright extensions, the DMCA (which is really just a double-dip on copyright infringement in most cases) and other changes to the initial law. As it becomes weaker, it just becomes more like contract law where the contract is already included in the government's books.
We can live without copyright, but we either weaken the protections beyond what copyright set out to do, or we weaken the public domain even further. When we try to balance out these two in some fashion, we get back to really just instituting copyright in another name.
Even the OSS crowd using the GPL uses contract law and copyright together to enforce the 'this stays public' stance on their code. The copyright side of it allows the contract to be transparent to most users who don't write code (it just appears similar to a public domain app or freeware), and don't have to be bogged down by agreeing to the full contract when copyright already specifies the default contract.