[belorn]

There is a fairly major difference between a copyright of 100+ years, 10 years and 0 years. Right now we have 100+ years and thus we need GPL as a counter force.

If it was 10 years than we would likely still need GPL. The industry would likely change a bit towards more hostile design, so gpl would likely change to address those.

A world without copyright would also change things significantly. I would suspect more companies would turn to services in order to create restrictive TOS, which would create incentivizes for counter pushes with licenses like AGPL. We can already see this with AI and data scraping where traditional copyright currently do not exist. In the absent of copyright, companies are creating TOS that restrict the use of scraping for AI learning. Time will tell if such "licenses" will be enforceable, but in theory people are simply replacing copyright law with anti-hacking laws.

At the end there will likely always be a GPL-like concept as long there are legal frameworks that is used to restrict how creative works and tools are consumed, used and extended.

[teddyh]

In the very early history of computing, it was still belived that copyright did not apply to computer programs. What large companies, like IBM, did was to require all customers to first sign a contract where the customer was forbidden, among many other things, to spread or copy the software.

[badlibrarian]

Excellent post and thank you for taking the time to participate in the thought experiment.