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Originally Posted by Jaime_Astorga
Not necessarily. Fan and individual videos have been produced....
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Just to be clear, I fully understand that it is possible to do some work of a collaborative or complicated nature with far fewer resources than it did 10 years ago. E.g.
Praying With Lior was shot digitally with a small crew, and probably cost a fraction of, and has a wider potential audience than, earlier documentaries that were done on film and could only be shown in movie theaters.
However, all you have to do is compare the "Waldemart" video to a real Harry Potter film to see what $100 million of production value gets you.
Perhaps in the future, enough people will be willing to participate in a distributed 3D rendering farm, or use other techniques, to reduce the cost of production. But I still view it as unlikely that you will make anything on the level of quality of a Harry Potter film or the Metropolitan Opera on your credit card. And, of course, we should keep in mind that small-scale works are fully protected by copyright, no matter how the creator(s) choose to distribute them.
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Originally Posted by Jamie_Astorga
So overall, some gains and some losses for software freedom from copyright abolition, since without copyright the GPL would lose the ability to force people using software copyrighted by it to release the source code of their modifications.
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Well....
Let's say we are in a world without copyright. The instant you write code, it's in the public domain. However, unless you construct the law such that it's a requirement that any and all code needs to be released openly, you could still use NDA's and contracts to develop proprietary code. And ironically, this method of establishing free software comes with a price, as it deprives people of the freedom/choice to keep their code private. It's like saying "you can have a diary, but only if you publish it on the Internet without any restrictions whatsoever."
Other consequences: this schema essentially eliminates their ability to earn an income from their code (though you could still charge for support). Also, vested interests like military and intelligence services will want to reserve the right to keep their code under wraps, which opens a big ol' loophole in the "you must be free" law.
So even if you believe that open source is a good thing, I think you'd have to be pretty extreme to say that "proprietary software has absolutely no right or reason to exist."
Again, the positive here for copyright is that it is flexible enough to allow both proprietary and free models to exist and flourish. If you can build a viable business or achieve other goals with GPL software, copyright will protect you every step of the way.