Abolish copyright.

You can charge for material things - paper, ink, packaging material, the time of the workers to prepare it. You can even charge for bandwidth, server upkeep, and electricity. But information has no material cost and therefore cannot be sold.

Exercise civil disobedience: it's your obligiation as a good citizen to be a pirate. We can negotiate again when they change the law to make copyrighted works enter the public domain within our lifetimes.

@sir Remember, the GPL wouldn't work without copyright.

The copyright system is fucked, but I think it's good that if I write software (or a book or whatever), I get to choose if corporations get to make money off it or not. Abolishing copyright must come with bigger systematic changes.

But absolutely reduce copyright from death of the author + 70 years down to something reasonable.

@mort GPL is a hack which uses copyright to deal with a separate problem: that closed source code is legal. Bonus: if copyright were abolished, reverse engineering would get stronger

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@sir @mort

To elaborate a bit on why something like GPL will not be necessary if copyright is abolished, and why the problem is not as separate as it seems.
Classic free software argument is on this is "you would not hide source without malicious purpose, there is no other incentive". The only argument that was able to stand any kind of ground against that is "I want to protect my copyright". If copyright goes, closed source goes with it, by common sense or common sense turned into law if necessary (but I don't think it would be necessary).

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