[henrikschroder]

The whole point of the GPL is so people have the freedom to tinker with the source code (this has been said by Stallman many times). If we had no copyright laws, there would be nothing stopping people from releasing binaries only. The difference would be that you could share the copyrighted works with anybody.

Would this really benefit the community?

The flipside is also that everyone would be free to reverse-engineer everything, which is a pretty powerful good, but I see your point and I agree with it, it's probably better to have copyright than to not have it.

Then again, you could of course have a completely different society where all software must be available in source form by law, but I have a hard time seeing that happen anywhere. :-)