Copyright laws are a finite duration social and legal grant to the creators of intellectual property with the intention of encouraging creation of work.
It is artificial relative to a particular vision of a "free" market, but the same could be said about any of the mechanisms that structure the market, thereby allowing it to function. In order to have a market you must have some rules. So what we do is try to figure out what rules work well and which ones impede things.
Copyright/Patent/Trademark isn't a priori bad. It has funded many musicians, writers, inventors, painters, etc. It has often been referred to as one of the great innovations of Enlightenment era free-market practice. It allowed generations of thinkers to have compensation when previously the only form of wealth was goods and land backed up by physical violence.
This is a nuanced topic, and I think it makes sense to treat it as such.
> Copyright/Patent/Trademark isn't a priori bad. It has funded many musicians, writers, inventors, painters, etc.
There is no reason why one can't pay money even when copyright laws wouldn't exist. I often do, for exampl for open source projects or for free ebooks where the author still asks for a donation if one can afford. The only difference is that the creator cannot force you, which I consider as a good thing.
If you're trying to get paid for creative work, donations simply don't work as a model.
There's a fundamental problem for both the arts and sciences, which is that in general terms, knowledge and creativity do not have a market value.
You can't place a market value on a Mozart opera or the Theory of Relativity. You can't even place a market value on last week's most downloaded SoundCloud track. Or on the Linux kernel.
Copyright is an attempt to butt-join creativity with a market economy. As such, it almost works, and it's the least bad solution for the context.
But it's still the wrong answer. I'm not sure what a better answer would be, but it could be something like giving a person with unusual verifiable talent extra resources and time to pursue their interests.
Academia used to work like that, but academia is always highly politicised, both internally and externally, which adds friction and error bars.
If there was a way to create a similar system with less politics, that might work better.
Or not. It's a hard problem to solve. But the current marketisation of everything - and FOSS is still marketised in its own way, IMO - is making things worse, not better.
That's the patronage or tip jar model. It has also funded many people. But not as many as the copyright model.
To flip your force model around, you cannot force people to create for you. But the hope of future money does provide incentive to many of them. Robert Heinlein, for example, started writing in order to pay of his mortgage.
> To flip your force model around, you cannot force people to create for you. But the hope of future money does provide incentive to many of them.
But who says that this future money has to be enforced by copyright laws? It is also possible by either asking for donations (from which for example Tarn and Zach Adams, the creators of Dwarf Fortress, live) or something similar to Kickstarter/Indiegogo (the product won't be created/released until some money is donated).
So in other words: Even this incentive wouldn't be killed if there were no copyright laws.
No one is forcing you to read their works in the first place.
Nor is your example correct. The first sale doctrine still applies. If you own a legal copy then you do not need to give money to the copyright holder to sell the copy. If someone else has a copy, then you can buy it without sending any money to the copyright holder.
Granted, we appear to have collectively and foolishly decided to reflexively click on "I agree", and switch to on-line rentals instead of actual purchases, making this harder. But it is only illegal if you make a copy. So don't do that. Then there's no (data) highway robbery. Problem solved!
> But it is only illegal if you make a copy. So don't do that.
So in other words you argue against free speech (creating a copy) and pro censorship. Writing texts that obey the censorship laws (or in western countries copyright laws) is illegal about nowhere.
Wow. Really? Be sure to tell Stallman that the Free Software Foundation, based as it is on strong copyright, is really against free speech and is pro censorship.
First: The FSF just uses copyright as a means to an end. They would rather wish that their four freedoms were part of the law.
Second: I'm no advocate of the FSF way. For some reasons I think that the idea that one has to share the source code is dubious (among these reasons: what, for example, if I share the source code but obfuscate it; or if I change the source code so that it from now on is generated from some metacode: Do I have to share source code that is on the same level as the original one or do I have to share the metacode?). Instead in my opinion the community should develop much better methods of reverse engineering so that sharing the source code will not make much of a difference anymore. So in this sense the way to go is some kind of BSD-like license which also allows universal reverse engineering of built binaries. Such a license would also work if there were no/very weak copyright laws (since one can always do this, it just might be that the laws disallow it) in opposite the the GPL/AGPL.
Why do you continue to talk to me, a known censor and oppressor of free speech?
As for the FSF way, you aren't forced to share the code. That's one of the four freedoms you mentioned. It's only when you distribute something based on the code where you are forced (by the horrid anti-free speech Stallman) to also include the code through one of several mechanism.
If you do decide to distribute it, and your software incorporates someone else's work under the GPL, then there's already a clause which prohibits you from obfuscating the code. ("The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it".) It's in v2 and v3.
Disassemblers are a thing. They are quite good these days. Let's assume perfect reverse engineering. Even with source code it's hard to reverse-engineer how a large project works.
Though not perfect. No one had yet reverse engineered Skype.
> universal reverse engineering of built binaries
Your complaints seems to be with contract law, not copyright law. I believe US and EU copyright already allows you to reverse engineer built binaries, with some restriction.
The problem is that people voluntarily agree to licenses which restrict that right.
It is artificial relative to a particular vision of a "free" market, but the same could be said about any of the mechanisms that structure the market, thereby allowing it to function. In order to have a market you must have some rules. So what we do is try to figure out what rules work well and which ones impede things.
Copyright/Patent/Trademark isn't a priori bad. It has funded many musicians, writers, inventors, painters, etc. It has often been referred to as one of the great innovations of Enlightenment era free-market practice. It allowed generations of thinkers to have compensation when previously the only form of wealth was goods and land backed up by physical violence.
This is a nuanced topic, and I think it makes sense to treat it as such.