> People sometimes miss that copyleft is powered by copyright.
That is legally true, but it is also true that copyleft is necessary because of copyright. Without copyright (or if copyright did not apply to software) there would be no need for copyleft and very little motive to produce proprietary software. What was produced could be reverse engineered, or used a binary blobs, and compatible replacements produced.
Where the only choice was keeping the source code a trade secret and obfuscating the distributed form or keep source open the latter would easily dominate.
If copyright law were to be removed, there will still be DRM, SaaSS, trade secret software and publicly released binary-only software without source code, and companies will have the same incentives to use those protection mechanisms as they have now.
IP ownership is important for people to want to create original work. You protect people’s right to own things and benefit from them and this makes them inclined to create more new things. Alternatively, no one owns anything and people create things because they are told to. I think there is strong evidence which system is more powerful.
You are leaving out people creating things because they want to or are paid to (e.g. patrons). People did create things before copyright law, and the quality of creations for those motives is generally higher.
The very widespread use of open source software (and the world's dependence on it) refutes your point.
> Without copyright (or if copyright did not apply to software) there would be no need for copyleft and very little motive to produce proprietary software.
However, what I am saying is that the full truth looks like this:
> Without IP ownership laws, there would be no need for copyleft and very little motive to produce any new software, or any original work at all.
The concept of intellectual property is the motive that gave us the technological process so far, from transistors to transformers.
> People did create things before copyright law, and the quality of creations for those motives is generally higher.
In the same vein you could say that before civilization people did not kill each other, steal from each other, etc. all the time and so we should remove the laws that prosecute murder and theft.
Not at all. Just like the values of personal property or human life, IP ownership laws are a continuation for what naturally existed since before civilization. In a small society, if you did something new and cool and good for community, you gained prestige and respect. Once society grows in numbers and moves towards less trust and evolves from tribal personal conflict resolution towards dedicated legal system, these things become codified in laws.
So not only the concept of IP implicitly existed before civilization, it probably is what gave us civilization. Recognition, prestige, social standing are things that compel each of us individually to drive progress. They exist automatically in a small high trust human society; in a large global low trust society they would be lost if not for legal mechanisms to compensate for it.
> The very widespread use of open source software (and the world's dependence on it) refutes your point.
I am not sure how closely you are following this thread but just in case, you are replying to a thesis that FOSS was made possible by copyleft, and therefore by copyright. As far as I’m concerned, you are yet to present a convincing counter-argument.
> You are leaving out people creating things because they want to or are paid to (e.g. patrons).
Many famous FOSS projects were started by and mostly contributed to by people who had dayjobs and wanted to play with fun stuff in spare time. However, 1) many of these jobs might be threatened because certain corporations use that IP, without licensing it appropriately, to train systems intended to replace them, and 2) the promise to those people was that their work will remain for public benefit—thanks to copyleft and GPL, which are now being eroded, as those voluntary contributors increasingly turn into unpaid programmers for middlemen corporations reselling their work to highest bidders. If you believe that this does not affect the motivations behind FOSS, you do you, I have nothing to say.
That is legally true, but it is also true that copyleft is necessary because of copyright. Without copyright (or if copyright did not apply to software) there would be no need for copyleft and very little motive to produce proprietary software. What was produced could be reverse engineered, or used a binary blobs, and compatible replacements produced.
Where the only choice was keeping the source code a trade secret and obfuscating the distributed form or keep source open the latter would easily dominate.