[dcow]

I believe the correct answer is “nobody deserves the copyright”. It’s a big fat myth that creatives would starve if copyright disappeared tomorrow. Think of all the countless hours society has wasted arguing about who owns creative expression. If we assign it to the public, we can move on and find better ways to keep creatives housed and fed.

[iamacyborg]

Creatives absolutely would suffer if they lost copyright protection.

[dcow]

No they really wouldn't. Companies and fans would commission art. We pay our damn food service staff on “would you like to pay a little extra today” tips method. Don’t tell me, especially with zero justification, that creatives depend on the need to control who copies our society’s ultimately culture. There are absolutely other ways and we’re too scared to try them.

[iamacyborg]

> Companies and fans would commission art.

Why would they when they’d have every right to take it for free?

Creative endeavours would be absolutely stillborn if only people wealthy enough to practice their craft could pursue the thing

[dcow]

They don’t have a right to extract art from artists… commission means pay for a piece up front, not after the fact. And on top of that you can only make digital copies cheaply.

Again they would not be “stillborn”. We’ve figured out crowdsourcing and popularity-based compensation (YT, patreon, etc.). You are just making statements without backing them up with readonable arguments.

[I-M-S]

The person you're replying to explicitly stated that a different way to compensate creatives for their talents should be put in place in case copyright is eliminated.

[Goronmon]

"Just do something different that works better." is hardly an explicit statement.

[dcow]

We already have systems that work better. None of them depend on copyright. Crowdfunding [generally commissions], patreon-type platforms, sponsored content, live performances, etc etc etc.

[Ray20]

Will there be any downsides?

[shagie]

Every bit of open source is founded on the license enforced by copyright and the ability for the creator to authorize the creation and distribution of derivative works.

Without it, anything that is published could be taken (once the copyright has expired), repackaged in some user inaccessible way and resold.

It is copyright that enforces the license of GPL. Without copyright, no license on creative work has any teeth.

[dcow]

The GPL is considered by its author to be a “hack” on the copyright system to perpetually enforce source availability. Most consider it unnecessarily restrictive and would prefer a world without it, Stallman included. But since Xerox used copyright to sue people trying to fix their own broken copiers, which they owned, here we are.

Point is, removing copyright also removes the need for the GPL in the first place. All knowledge should be public domain.

[shagie]

Removing copyright allows a company to take something that is in the public domain, make changes to it and not release the changes.

Yes, the GPL is a hack on the distribution of derivative works... but without those teeth to bite with and enforce, then nothing prevents one from taking some code that is not-copyrighted, making changes to it, and keeping the code to it completely in house while releasing it in a way that is not user modifiable.

The ideals of the GPL (and AGPL) of sharing the contributions back to the community to further progress would be unenforceable and lost.

[dcow]

You forget that because the company cannot enforce copyright, I can just take whatever bits the company distributes to me and do what I please with them. I wouldn’t he opposed to a broad law requiring software companies to make buildable sources available for all software they use to deliver a product, but I doubt we’re that liberal yet. That is essentially what Stallman was asking for and the GPL is a means.