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.
@newt I know this is sarcastic, but this does not follow from what I said. What actually follows is that the copyright of your proprietary software ought to be invalid, too. If I get your source code, I'm gonna leak it, and if I get your binaries, I'm going to reverse engineer them.
@newt no, but you're still not getting it. Copyleft is a hack which uses copyright to subvert copyright. In a world without copyright, copyleft would not be necessary.
@newt let me try another angle. Another effect of the GPL is to require the disclosure of source code. This is not really related to copyright, but more of a contractual agreement which depends on copyright. If copyright ceased to exist, then yes, this would cease to be effective.
However, I think that this requirement to disclose source should ALSO be covered by law, as a separate matter. We can abolish copyright AND require disclosure of source.
@newt maybe you shouldn't be questioning the abolishment of copyright on the grounds that it's a necessary means for people to make a living, and instead question why people need copyright to _make a living_. Why is the human needs for food and shelter contingent on having a viable business model? Should we infringe upon the individual rights to share information for the sake of making that business model more viable - or should we maybe make sure that people's basic meets are met, period?
@newt no one is entitled to a viable business model or a certain lifestyle. I believe you are entitled to basic human needs, including happiness, and that this extends to authors as well as everyone else. With this axiom in place, the whole economic model of the human experience changes. I'm getting kind of tired of explaining this (fourth time today)... but try to question your assumptions and build up an internal model of how you might survive and achieve happiness under these constraints. It's possible.
It's not the role of the law to limit rights to make more businesses viable. If it were, we wouldn't be able to take a piss for lack of someone to charge us for the pleasure.
@newt happiness is subjective, but let's not open that can of worms. I was using it as a shorthand for the lifestyle you argued that you are entitled to.
@newt if you (and anyone else) could achieve that lifestyle without copyright, would you still argue for copyright?
@newt that's because you're viewing it through the lens of an economy which has not been adjusted to account for the lack of copyright.
@newt well, we haven't tried, so who's to say
@newt well, what we are doing now isn't working. So we know that it's not good, and we ought to try something else.
@newt it's not working for the commons. Public domain is a joke. No one is alive today who was alive the last time something entered the public domain. It's working for you in only the most short sighted and immediate sense.
@sir @newt I think Tom Scott’s video on the YouTube copyright system [0] would be a good addition to this discussion, and I think many of the points he makes can also be applied to software.
Super short abstract: the system is broken, but it’s the best we’ve got right now. It should be fixed, but doing so properly is difficult and will take a long time because of how copyright systems can be - and are - abused.
I’m inclined to agree with his assessment.
@reykjalin @sir @newt OK, watched it and anything I could say to praise it would feel like an understatement.
The combination of length, quality, and topic remind me of Ross Scott's `"Games as a service" is fraud.`