I think it is quite likely that we as a society would be better off without any kind of copyright or IP.
This might prevent some of the parties doing huge upfront investments in some of the projects, but if we learned something from OSS and, most importantly, Linux is that gradual and tiny improvements over 30 years can compound to a behemoth that eats any commercial solution for lunch.
I am not sure I agree with this statement in the absolute. I think about art, and artists as a musician myself.
One advantage of copyright is that it does, indeed, give artists recourse when people use their works without compensation. The photographer whose picture was copied and pasted onto an advertisement. The musician trying to sell their first album.
You could argue that litigation is too costly for an individual, which may be true, but this is one reason artists choose to sell their images via Getty. They gain access to a marketplace, and Getty handles licensing and enforcement, which makes it easier for artists to be fairly compensated for their work.
This isn’t absolute either: there is enforcement too aggressive (ask any Youtube creator), or limits too long (Disney).
But I cannot help but think that, with no copyright whatsoever, then the little guys will have a harder time protecting themselves from folks who would otherwise like to use that art without compensating the creator.
The truth is somewhere between your statement and parent's, in my opinion.
Copyright is necessary but the laws today are draconian and far too extensive. For works since 1978, copyright lasts for the entire length of the author's life, plus an additional 70 years. The "Mickey Mouse" protection act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act) increased this even further for some works.
There's a need to allow artists and writers to make money from their creations and not just get their work instantly reproduced by pirates. At the same time, it's in the public interest for their work to become widely available after a short period of protection. I don't know exactly how long that period should be to maximally benefit society, but 15 years sounds a lot more reasonable than life+75 years.
It's absolutely absurd that Arthur Conan Doyle's distant ancestors can today be suing people for creating derivatives of Sherlock Holmes, a literary character conceived in 1887. Sherlock Holmes belongs to the public, not some greedy relatives trying to leech a living from him.
"There's a need to allow artists and writers to make money"
The current system does not satisfy that standard. Artists and writers don't make money due to far-reaching copyright. Musicians make money by selling tickets to concerts and contract performances. Journalists make money from newspaper pay-walls and advertising.
Your music argument is plausible, but the journalism one doesn't hold water: if there were no copyright, it would only take one paywall subscriber to copy the contents to a paywall-free site (e.g. wsj.com -> freewsjarticles.com), and poof: journalists aren't making money anymore.
I used to work for an education-resources publisher that had a problem with lecturers photocopying their books. We created a portal with value-add features, and put the ordering-user ID on every page of every book. Photocopying all but disappeared once those measures were in place - people valued and used the bundled services. The institutions that were buying the books were slow to ship IT services. But we were fast. The lecturers started asking us for forums and work-submission and marking-workflow features to help them work with their students, and we did.
(The software lead had an idea that users should be able to just store and share stuff on the site. She moved to Canada during the project to join a new team, and did the same thing for the game they were running. They noticed that a lot of people were using the feature to share photos. So they focused on that, and that became Flickr.)
Newspapers are already well down the road towards this future - as part of subscription you get comments sections, and forums, and dating sites, and wine clubs. Still, I see significant unused potential. Each newspaper should view itself as some mix of bloomberg/twitter/linkedin, and encourage interaction between its members audience.
>I am not sure I agree with this statement in the absolute.
I don’t know, you see, sometimes I have some doubts about my uncertainty. But should I trust my memory about what might have happened in my head in the past?
>I think about art, and artists as a musician myself. One advantage of copyright is that it does, indeed, give artists recourse when people use their works without compensation.
Practices of art and culture, including music, long predate any copyright law. Or even money, most likely (an archeologist will tell you that with more confidence about the veracity of such a claim).
According monopoly of exploitation rarely turn into proliferation of diversity, most of the time it will fall into feedback loop where a few entities will "take it all" and widely spread the "best fit for all".
>The photographer whose picture was copied and pasted onto an advertisement.
There are different topic here. In the French droit d’auteur, you have a separation of "moral rights" – including who is granted to publish your work in which context – and "patrimonial rights" – how monetization of the work is managed.
Copyright mostly only became relevant once it become practical to mass produce works, e.g. with a printing press. (Which was, although it took some time, the proximate cause of copyright law in Europe.)
The term copyright misguides your assumptions I think. Apparition of printers in China, long before Westen rediscovered it, didn't lead to that kind of laws.
I mean, cultural and social structures also play a meaningful part on what is enacted.
The topic behind copyright is not simply about copy, it's about who benefit of some exclusive privileges on cultural works and what kind of social inequalities are enforcable by law.
There is a documented situation where Getty attempted to charge an artist for their own work (https://qht.co/item?id=22340178).
The only reason we know of that particular case is because they happened to charge the original creator.
The dynamic is ripe for corruption. If Getty failed to report all the works they were collecting for, and instead siphoned money off on the side, how would anyone know?
In a no copyright world, I assume you would have aggregators who vacuum up photos, books, etc. and index/package/curate them in a way that they're more easily discoverable and consumable by the people willing to pay for that service. Without paying anything to the original creators.
You've seen this on a small scale in areas like clipart. It's not a very lucrative business though and it does mean you only have creators with either "passion" or money.
> I think it is quite likely that we as a society would be better off without any kind of copyright or IP.
I agree with that. IP also doesn't make any sense to me from a philosophical perspective. I don't understand why making one thing once should give me a monopoly on making things that are similar to that thing.
The fact that the question of how similar a thing must be to fall under my monopoly is so arbitrary and ill-defined also leads to an enormous amount of resources being wasted on litigation and designing around the law.
Non-disclosure agreements are sufficient to allow an inventor to be first to market. They should not be able to use the government to enforce a monopoly after that.
> I think it is quite likely that we as a society would be better off without any kind of copyright or IP.
This is pretty much the FSF's argument in a nutshell. It's pretty obvious what the end game for "intellectual property" is once you read RMS's "Right to Read."
True. IMHO IP law is based on a moral and not a utilitarian basis, and as we know from almost all recent FLOSS projects especially in Cloud (Linux, Kubernetes, ...) IP is just a massive hindrance to productivity and has a net negative effect on the industry.
True, but that motivation was based on assumptions which are no longer true. Things no longer take effort to copy, and information can flow across the world in an instant. There is no longer any need to encourage copyright in order to get better information from foreign countries.
I guess the argument is that "copyleft" is not needed without "copyright". In particular, look at the four freedoms:
0) free to run the program as you wish, for any purpose
1) The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish.
2) The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others.
3) The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.
The only thing taking away these freedoms is copyright and public domain software gives you all these freedoms.
The only caveat is with 1) in that one could use digital restrictions management to make this harder. However, there is a difference between "circumventing DRM is difficult" and "circumventing DRM is illegal".
No, the GPL depends on copyright to function. Otherwise it degenerates into a BSD-family license (actually not even that, as you wouldn't have to give credit to the original author). GPL requires you to provide the source of binary software you ship to your users by revoking your copyright grant if you do not do that. If you remove the threat of copyright enforcement, then I can ship your GPL library without shipping source.
A bsd family licence allows the next programmer to add on new legal restrictions (e.g. no modifying the binary, no distributing the modified binary, no reverse engineering the binary, ...).
In a world with no copyright the source code requirement dies, but all the remaining freedoms stay intact. Reverse engineering and decompilers become much more important.
Copyright isn't the only thing that can keep people from having those freedoms -- even without copyright a developer could choose not to distribute the source code. It seems likely that less proprietary software would exist without copyright, though.
Who can say for sure what would have happened if Linus had used an MIT-style license instead. Linux would not necessarily have failed. But if, for example, a proprietary version had become dominant, that would have been enabled by copyright law. It's not the existence of copyright law that allows Linux to succeed as an open-source project.
Huge upfront investment like writing a book or composing music. It's a common moral intuition that it's not ok to take what others spent time developing and profit from it instead of them without adding much yourself.
It's the scope and duration of the protection that is a problem but I think it's too simplistic to say we don't need it at all.
It’s not at all clear how you are comparing Linux to its closed competitors, but frankly, if that’s the best example you can pick, I’d suggest copyright is largely winning that battle. Yes, Linux has probably “won” in some markets (servers/IoT being the obvious ones), but there are plenty of markets where that is not even close to being true.
Phones, billions of devices running various embedded real-time os, gaming like Xbox and playstation, watches, smart TVs, medical devices, space systems, and many other places are not Linux dominated, and many of these have almost zero Linux presence.
For smartphones, Linux-based Android has the largest market share. It is linux dominated. For less smart phones, there are Linux based operating systems like KaiOS.
Yes, I think most deployed devices don't use Linux, and I'm not aware of any major linux using gaming console, but it's not unheard of, e.g. SNES classic mini. Also, from what I saw, Linux has a good foothold for game streaming offerings, but it's a new market and not yet established that it'll last.
It seems to me very intuitive that a lack of IP protection of some sort discourages innovation.
I cannot imagine wanting to write a book if I didn't have some recourse against people distributing my book freely.
The policy concerns around IP protection for both patent and copyright are clear: the minimum amount of protection that doesn't discourage innovation.
Lawmakers know or should know that we all benefit from a rich public domain, which is why there are limitations on both copyright and patents in terms of both duration and general application, and I am happy to argue that copyright is too strong, particularly in terms of duration (thanks Disney), but I simply can't agree that we "would be better off without any kind of copyright or IP".
There are so many ways of distributing thought and expression with little to no cost other than the time and effort of the creator. In practice, books almost always require more. I'm struggling to see how using a blog instead, is some sort of "failure of empathy".
But I guess the broader point remains, even if only 20% of potential authors are, like me, so evil that they wouldn't devote a year of their lives to writing a book that they couldn't monetize in some way, well that's still represents a 20% decrease in innovation on some level.
Those that absorb effort, resources and risk in creating something new/innovative should at least have the opportunity be compensated for their investment. The balance needs to be fair, and that’s what is being argued. It’s simply not as black and white as how you have described this issue.
Interesting question. The GPL was first published in 1989. Let's assume it was first used for something Stallman wrote, by himself, with no other authors. Stallman is 67 now. US male average life expectancy gives him about another 10 years (sorry to be morbid). Current US copyright law means his work is under copyright for 70 years after he passes away. So that's about 80 years from now, or in 2100 the first-ever GPL program can be distributed in binary form without its source, as it was written in 1989. What a gift to the public domain.
IMO IP protection should be short lived. Imagine if copyright ownership lasted 10 years. The profits made on producing a video game would be almost identical since almost all profit is made in the first few years and half of the lifetime profit is in the first week.
What it would mean is the games that we all played as kids but are long since out of store shelves would now be free to distribute.
This might prevent some of the parties doing huge upfront investments in some of the projects, but if we learned something from OSS and, most importantly, Linux is that gradual and tiny improvements over 30 years can compound to a behemoth that eats any commercial solution for lunch.