[devishard]

Working within the copyright system that exists and affects us all should not be misinterpreted as agreeing with copyright.

Copyrighting software is terrible for society. But given that copyrighting software exists and can't easily be gotten rid of, what can we do to minimize the damage and keep software free (as in freedom)? I think the GPL is a good answer to that question.

[tptacek]

This is silly. The software FSF is most opposed to is protected not as much by copyright as by simple trade secrecy. It's not from honoring copyrights that DRM systems derive their power; that would be tautological, since the point of DRM systems is to thwart people who ignore copyright.

In a world without copyright, large corporations would have free rein to slurp up all the world's public software, extend it however they like, create whatever remaining functionality they needed, and publish none of it. None of what the GPL's copyleft attempts to accomplish would be possible.

[devishard]

> In a world without copyright, large corporations would have free rein to slurp up all the world's public software, extend it however they like, create whatever remaining functionality they needed, and publish none of it. None of what the GPL's copyleft attempts to accomplish would be possible.

That's only true of a world without copyright where no other system of rules around software existed. It's trivial to propose a set of rules that requires code sharing without copyright. In fact, such a set of rules would probably be much simpler than the GPL. Copyleft is really a convoluted hack on top of copyright.