Re: Were Intellectual Property to be abolished altogether, would you or FSF support it?

[Yasuaki Kudo]

   Thank you for all of your replies - I am no legal expert but in framing
   this hypothesis, the spirit of abolishing the Intellectual Property
   would perhaps also need to be stated (Legislators probably wouldn't be
   able to even make a draft without it 😅) and the society will need to be
   supportive of it.

   Otherwise, there will be all sorts of ways to work around the abolition
   , including never releasing the relevant information to the public.

   And yes, trademarks etc - it would be very inconvenient if we couldn't
   even make unique identifications 😅

   And there seems to be a long history for this
   subject. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright

   My original motivation of this inquiry is that my partners and I are in
   the process of starting an IT-focused 'worker cooperative' where, just
   like the GPL licensing, there is almost a playful inversion of
   Capitalistic values.  We will probably need to make software licensing
   decisions sooner or later and I wanted to get a wholistic view of this
   matter 😄.

   -Yasu

     On Jul 12, 2021, at 03:27, quiliro@riseup.net wrote:

   

     On 2021-07-10 4:44 p.m., Yasuaki Kudo wrote:

     This is a thought experiment:

     Would you or FSF support the idea of abolishing the concept of

     intellectual property altogether, making any form of 'Software

     Licensing', including GPL, null and void.  Gone also will be any

     form of Patents and Copyrights.

     Just curious 😄

     -Yasu

   Aaron Wolf <wolftune@riseup.net> writes:

     I support the abolition of copyright and patent law while keeping

     trademark law and moving some important things to new laws:

     - mandate source release for published works

     - prohibit DRM

     - expand trademark law to cover all forms of plaigiarism (some
     aspects

     of that rely on copyright today, which is a bad legal structure)

     Abolishing copyright and patent laws without the rest *might* still
     be

     net positive, but it would definitely have a mix of pros and cons.

     Aaron

     Snowdrift.coop

   I like Aaron's take.  Yasuaki: consider that if you remove copyright
   without Aaron's suggestions, it would make all programs for which
   source
   code is not provided non-free software.  And, as Aaron has also
   mentioned, some copyleft licences (such as the AGPL) prevent DRM in a
   way.  Censorship in any form is bad for freedom.

References

   1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright