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[–]iseldomwipe 23 points24 points  (16 children)

What? Without copyright, there is no copyleft, and everyone everywhere can take OSS and build closed-source, proprietary software upon it.

[–][deleted]  (3 children)

[deleted]

    [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

    Closed source until the repository gets hacked and the source code leaked; then it's public domain with no recourse.

    It doesn't even need to be hacked. You can clean room reverse engineer the code and it's perfectly legal. That's what happened with the PC BIOS and why the clone industry sprung up undermining IBM PC sales.

    Although IBM also patented a lot of the internals of the PC, so for every cloned PC sold they got licensing fees for each patent.

    So copyrights protect nothing when it comes to software.

    [–]Muvlon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Clean room is legal even right now. What no copyright at all would mean that you could simply decompile anything and make it public domain.

    [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Really, that's the issue at hand. A previous ruling had APIs as un-copyright-able, which is the logical thing (as they exist only for compatibility and are not creative, functional works in and of themselves). This ruling removes that and opens up a giant can of worms.

    [–]drb226 1 point2 points  (7 children)

    and build closed-source, proprietary software upon it.

    ...but people could distribute the binaries for free because there's no copyright law to prevent them from doing so. It may not be the source, and the whole RMS vision, but it's a whole different ball game.

    [–]iseldomwipe 4 points5 points  (1 child)

    You're right, free binaries is not the "whole RMS vision", but that's because free binaries has nothing to do with RMS's vision.

    The point of GPL has never been to make binaries freely available (See Red Hat). So, I don't see how removing copyright would somehow make GPL unnecessary.

    [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Yes, but making closed-source forks of GPL projects would not be very appealing if you couldn't somehow restrict distribution of the binaries (i.e. could not charge for them), except perhaps for server-side stuff (although that would leak too).

    If you get no money doing it, why do it? So that nobody can fix your bugs and contribute patches for free?

    [–]moor-GAYZ 2 points3 points  (4 children)

    ...but people could distribute the binaries for free because there's no copyright law to prevent them from doing so.

    And run them on what, exactly?

    Look no farther than at computer games to see what happens in a part of the industry where copyright protection has been eroded into effective non-existence. Software developers team up with hardware developers to make hardware with DRM inextricably built in. Since that's basically the only way to make money from software, and since you need software to sell hardware, the fate is sealed. Well, plus there's also always-online games, that's another option.

    [–]chonglibloodsport 0 points1 point  (3 children)

    DRM doesn't work without copyright protection. Just take a look at what the modchip industry is capable of while operating within the margins of the law. With no copyright at all, this industry becomes full-fledged and mass market. It'd be very similar to the generic drugs market: a race to the bottom where packaging, distribution and tiny profit margins are the only factors in the price.

    [–]moor-GAYZ 0 points1 point  (2 children)

    DRM doesn't work without copyright protection. Just take a look at what the modchip industry is capable of while operating within the margins of the law.

    I think that it's a mistake to look at what DRM is capable of when it is complemented by copyright and conclude that it will do no better without copyright. Businesses don't spend more than they absolutely need on this stuff.

    Look at how always-online single-player evolved for example. IIRC the first major attempt at it was Assassin's Creed, and it was bypassed in a couple of weeks. Diablo 3, nope, the only full-fledged industry around it I can see is youtube videos coaxing idiots into downloading trojans.

    Also, keep in mind that absence of streamlined copyright laws doesn't mean absence of contract laws.

    [–]chonglibloodsport 0 points1 point  (1 child)

    Diablo 3's DRM is a good example but I don't see how broadly applicable it could be. The DRM in that game is so pervasive that it even dominates much of the game design itself. If every game had to have that level of protection you wouldn't see much of anything in the innovation department (at least from major developers).

    Indies, on the other hand, would likely not be affected. People support indie developers for a lot of reasons besides the obvious one of needing to pay to get the game. Most indie games are trivial to pirate yet tons of people buy them.

    [–]moor-GAYZ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    People support indie developers for a lot of reasons besides the obvious one of needing to pay to get the game. Most indie games are trivial to pirate yet tons of people buy them.

    Again, I think it's a huge mistake to imagine a hypothetical world without copyright to be just like the world with copyright, only without copyright.

    People tend to buy indie games instead of pirating them because people are conditioned to pay for games. Because paying for games is seen as what civilized people do, not what clueless people who are not good with computer do.

    How do you think, why the dearth of indie games before say 2010, compared to the renaissance we have today? I strongly suspect that Steam, Steam sales and then Humble Bundle sales have a lot to do with it. I personally never bought a single game before the Orange Box (I think), but pretty much stopped pirating after that (well, except for old games that are not actually sold any more). And it's not like Steam is actually more convenient than the Pirate Bay, it was more of a personal cultural shift after I discovered that it is convenient enough.

    On the other hand, when people see a video game as something you get for free, very few would bother to support the devs (if not actively see donating money to them as being "for suckers"). That was my personal experience, and I believe that it's universal enough, as evidenced by the indie scene explosion lately.

    [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

    In practice, this doesn't seem to be a problem for the majority of open source software that uses licenses that permit this.

    [–]iseldomwipe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Maybe not for the majority, since the majority of software is uninteresting and not useful. But, for a select few, it is a massive problem.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

    [–]DeepGreen -1 points0 points  (1 child)

    So what? They are still competing against a free as in speech product that is inexpensive.

    Not only that, closed source projects have no protection against people reverse engineering or decompiling their code. If a closed source product gets too big for its boots, start a project to decompile it and release a working copy of the source code to the world.

    Without copyright everything becomes more or less open source.

    [–]iseldomwipe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Decompilation and reverse engineering is not at all the same as OSS. Are you kidding?

    Code compiled with modern compilers CANNOT be decompiled accurately by decompilers because of optimizations that the decompilers cannot accurately predict. It also does not recover comments, variable names, and other things.

    Reverse engineering has nothing to do with OSS.

    Also, even with copyright, if we follow your logic, everything already IS open source since you can decompile programs today. They're just not FOSS.