Every contract, every law states what we see as the bare minimum required not to be actively harmful. They're society's skeleton. But bodies are more than bone, and societies are more than people doing the bare legal minimum.
Look at what the law requires of parents, for example. Food, shelter, clothing, school attendance, a lack of physical abuse. But parents who do the legal minimum and no more are awful parents, and awful people. But more laws wouldn't help. What kind of law could guarantee love? What kind of police could enforce it?
Community spirit is not something that can be expressed in a contract. Acting like people should have foreseen a particular asshole and tried to defend against them contractually is victim-blaming. The actual solution is for assholes to hear from the community that the behavior isn't welcome.
Sure, if attribution is a requirement then the natural thing to do is to turn it into a legal requirement. But I don't think that is the discussion here.
It comes down to how we want to treat open source. In order to encourage open source, I believe giving credit, even if not required, is courteous. Corporations are not monolithic entities that are perfectly defined. People work on these corporations.
It will be lot more rude if your coworker now hit social media berating you for stealing other people's ideas. If just office ideas were this important may be they need to be submitted with process of academic journals with proper attribution.
It can't be both ways: "Announcing that take my idea / software and run with it" And if someone does, telling them "you are first rate moocher, aren't ya?"
Would it? I’d be inclined to agree with the coworker.
The message is not ‘stealing other people’s ideas’, it’s ‘stealing other people’s ideas without acknowledgement’.
Huh, I never heard of 'stealing with acknowledgement'. That'd be plain usage.
> I’d be inclined to agree with the coworker.
I'd think that co-worker would be subject of constant derision where people would run every trivial thing by them asking if they had thought it originally.
Edit: To be clear I support directly confronting folks taking ideas often without attribution or taking to higher ups if that is so important. But social shaming means the person better be prepared to live up to much higher public standards than it would be for some interpersonal issue.
Reducing the issue to the bare minimal legal requirement is stooping low, that we cannot expect corporations to behave ethically, with common decency and respect, unless forced to do so by law. Sure, that's the real world, but we should demand better of the people who run and work in these corporations.
In a few places I worked at, this was just par for the course. It's all in the (corporate) game.
As much as decent, polite, and courteous people do exist (and I try to be one of them), it's a fact of life that assholes exist, and they often prosper on the back of such decent people.
Some of us think copyright is unfair and we want to use it as little as possible. That means using MIT or BSD licenses.
That doesn't mean we are against attribution. We are only against the use of coercion to get attribution.
We can say "It would be nice if you give attribution" without saying "I'm going to use my legal rights to coerce you into giving me attribution"
As it is today you can use your full control to allow full use with attribution. Of course the "unfairness" probably comes from the fact that you can't force others to do the same.
In my opinion the best option is to keep copyright at "full control" with a time limit. Probably 10-20 years. However that doesn't solve your desire for only attribution.
In the same way that we must continue to steer our car even in the presence of guard rails, we must continue to act morally in the presence of rules.