[tptacek]

If you believe that, do you also believe I have a right to take any code you ever write, regardless of how you've (heh) "licensed" it, and bake it into any closed source product I happen to want to use it in? If not, why not?

[int_19h]

I don't have a natural right to prevent you from doing so.

But there's social contracts on top of that. Copyright is one such. It's not a right at all - it's a privilege (specifically, monopoly grant on distribution of certain information), that we as a society have decided to grant some people, because it incentivizes them to do things that we as a society want them to do.

Coincidentally, this also applies to regular property in a broad sense. The shirt that you wear on your back is yours in a physical sense; but, say, an apartment that you own and rent out in New York while living in California is only yours because the society declares it to be, and enforces that on your behalf - you don't have a natural right to such property, it's a social contract.

And no, I'm not a communist. Not anymore so than this guy:

"It is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all... It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society."

- Thomas Jefferson, 1813

[bo1024]

I have mixed feelings about this, not sure exactly where I stand.[1] I think I might be ethically okay with a world without copyright control on code, especially because you could sign contracts governing how people use your code in exchange for revealing it to them. But it would take a lot of getting used to.

[1] Personally, I've put a few small open-source projects online and do take the stance that people can use them however they want, I assert no control over their use (I request attribution). But I don't make money from writing code so I'm not saying I think everyone else should do this.

[tptacek]

No, you couldn't. A contract that binds on someone after they obtain your source code is a license. In the coherent version of your world, once you've revealed your source code to someone, you can't stop them from publishing it to everybody else for free.

[hundt]

I mean, the license could have a nondisclosure/confidentiality agreement, right?

That wouldn't be a full substitute for copyright though. For example, if they broke the contract and distributed the code I don't think you could prevent other people from distributing it further.

[tptacek]

If you believe in contracts that selectively release source code for a fee subject to nondisclosure and other limitations on redistribution, you effectively believe in copyright. At most, you're saying that the default should be an unlimited right to redistribution. But that's not especially meaningful, because opting away from that default would be trivial, and practically every professional musician would do so immediately.

[bo1024]

So copyright is redundant with legal structures already in place...? (Meant to be tongue-in-cheek)