If there was no such thing as copyright, if you recorded a music track and gave it to somebody, they could legally sell it themselves to other people, and undercut you or just give it away for free. (of course people still do on a person-to-person basis, but this would make it completely legal for even a movie theatre to show hollywood movies without paying any rights)
Why is creators being able to make money in this way from their creations good for society? Well, previously, the method to make money from art before copyright was the patronage system, which involved wealthy individuals sponsoring an artist to create things on their behalf, with varying levels of interference in the process. This worked to some extent, but the fundamental idea underpinning copyright is that if everybody sponsors a small amount for a product then it will be better for most people, rather than catering to the specific tastes of a single wealthy individual.
You see this kind of thing happening nowadays with platforms like patreon - it is possible to earn a living from a relatively small subset of the people that actually consume your content, and even while giving it away for free, simply because those people have a desire to see more of the same stuff. The problem with patreon is that it has to overcome a little bit of a tradgedy of the commons problem, whereby stopping your own individual contribution is unlikely to have much of an impact on the quality of art produced. Nonetheless, it seems to have found it's niche, and is only growing.
What about if nobody pays for art? There are plenty of parts of our culture that nobody got any money for. Often things created by relatively nameless folk expecting nothing in return but the love of creating are some of our greatest cultural works, be them folk songs or open-source software.
While I speak mainly about art and music in this piece, any kind of intellectual property that can be copyright works in mostly the same way. There is relatively little that is different in the grand scheme of things between monetising a song and monetising a coputer program - both are practically impossible to do without allowing the user to share it futher without your control.
Doesn't it work the other way around currently? Instead of sharing the intellectual property for the better of the most people we lock the property in the hands of a few. Probably as the time goes the wealthy will accumulate all of the IP in their hands eventually.
Wheras previously, things were often super eclectic and weird, to suit the tastes of a particular individual.
Whether things that work for the majority of people results in lower quality art is an open debate. Personally I believe that it does end up with worse results, but the thinking behind copyright as it is implemented right now is that it is better.
But it's protected with a GPL-3.0 license. You can't just clone it, build, and sell it.
I think the base idea is that it's unfair for one person to spend years on a product and someone else to sell it. It's unfair for the people who have donated to the team that has built it.
The sense of unfairness prevents people from contributing.
You absolutely can. You can absolutely rename it, re-brand it and sell it for whatever you like. Your interpretation is exactly at odds with the expressed wish of the GNU Project. (see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html)
The GPL is about software freedom, not price.
[As an aside I've heard arguments that it's "unethical" to sell a GPL program. Which is absurd since it gives the buyer more choices, not fewer. If I choose to compile a GPL program into a binary, and provide it to the market in a useful form (with source code of course), the market can then absolutely choose to pay me to do that. Red Hat is a multi billion dollar company built on completely this premise. To declare that "unethical" is like saying that selling food is unethical because everyone could just grow their own (ignoring the value added by picking, distribution etc.) The conclusion being that value is added at many points in the supply chain, not just the first one, and people are certainly free to pay for that value.]
>> I think the base idea is that it's unfair for one person to spend years on a product and someone else to sell it. It's unfair for the people who have donated to the team that has built it.
The team (or individual) that creates the product absolutely determines the license for that product. By _choosing_ the GPL license they are _explicitly_ allowing people to rebrand it and sell it. So, no, it's not unfair to do what _they_ have explicitly allowed you to do. By suggesting it is "unfair" you are asserting that either you are not aware of the actual provisions of the GPL, or the authors were too lazy to select a license that matched their actual intentions.
If you want to prevent people from selling the work, then don't use GPL, instead use a license that prevents people from selling your work.
>> The sense of unfairness prevents people from contributing.
The license will absolutely determine how interested people are in contributing to your project. Of course, as you have shown, that doesn't stop contributors from being very unhappy when they think a license "means" something, and it turns out it doesn't. That is on the contributor though, not the project author.
In summary, if you are going to care about what happens to your work after contributing, then please make sure you understand the actual license that project is using and don't just assume terms that are not in effect.
The benefits seem obvious but there's still a place, in my opinion, for this topic.
They don't exist until I find them on Wikipedia
Why is that though? Would the progress just stop without such "protection"?