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There would be huge problems with killing copyright IMHO. Most open source licenses are based on it for example.

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/pirate-party...




At least in my opinion, the ultimate goal of Free Software is to kill copyright. In a perfect world, everything would be public domain and at the utmost, we'd have a right to attribution (ie, you may demand to be named as the creator of something you made). Copyleft is, right now, just a "necessary evil" to bring us closer to that goal. In a sense, it's a form of using the enemies' weapons against them - but what we actually want is mutual decommissioning.


Open-source writ large is a dumb marketing gimmick. As far as useful code goes, the people who care and respect other hackers release the code anyways, copyright or no.

"Free software" vastly overestimates the value and talent of the average user--I don't feel any pity for the average City Of Farm Wars user if they don't get the source to IE.


True, but open source would continue fine without copyright -- it's just mean that everything was MIT-licensed.


Wouldnt it then shift from being a copyright enforcement issue to a contract/license enforcement issue? I.e. you agreed to share your source code if you distribute, but now you didn't, so sue city?


But if there is no copyright, there is no need to license the software, you can just copy it without agreeing to anything. That's what it means for something to be in the public domain.

Contracts are only valid if there is an exchange of value; you could reasonably argue that there is no value in being granted a right you already have.




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