Without copyright, those contracts have nothing to offer you, so why should you agree to them? Without copyright, you could freely use, copy, reverse-engineer, modify, and distribute any bits you had.
Reverse engineering is not forbidden by copyright law – in fact it is a legally-protected right in the U.S., denied only by contracts like those that govern the use of proprietary software. Moreover, can you currently freely run a proprietary program without agreeing to its contract? As I said, copyright law does not restrict the running of programs (in fact, 17 U.S.C. § 117(a)(1) clarifies that running a program is not an infringement of copyright), so abolition of copyright law would have no effect on your ability to freely run non-free programs. Without copyright law, you would still be required to agree to contracts to use proprietary software. And those contracts can be written to emulate current copyright laws, forbidding distribution of programs (in fact, this is already being done).
Abolition of copyright law would win you no rights to proprietary software.
(Also, I think you've missed the huge impact of copyright on fields other than software, where the issue of "source code" doesn't matter as much. I'd count that as part of the "net win".)
Of course, abolition of copyright law would be great for freedom in other types of works (though in the case of opinion works I would like to see legal replacements for the "moral rights"-style protections afforded by Creative Commons and similar public licenses). However, it could be devastating for software freedom.
Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at Aurora. Ex-biologist. mjg59 on Twitter. Content here should not be interpreted as the opinion of my employer. Also on Mastodon.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Re: You?
Date: 2012-01-31 06:35 am (UTC)Reverse engineering is not forbidden by copyright law – in fact it is a legally-protected right in the U.S., denied only by contracts like those that govern the use of proprietary software. Moreover, can you currently freely run a proprietary program without agreeing to its contract? As I said, copyright law does not restrict the running of programs (in fact, 17 U.S.C. § 117(a)(1) clarifies that running a program is not an infringement of copyright), so abolition of copyright law would have no effect on your ability to freely run non-free programs. Without copyright law, you would still be required to agree to contracts to use proprietary software. And those contracts can be written to emulate current copyright laws, forbidding distribution of programs (in fact, this is already being done).
Abolition of copyright law would win you no rights to proprietary software.
Of course, abolition of copyright law would be great for freedom in other types of works (though in the case of opinion works I would like to see legal replacements for the "moral rights"-style protections afforded by Creative Commons and similar public licenses). However, it could be devastating for software freedom.