Copyright is fine. Software patents are not.
Copyright allows you to decide how your code is distributed. Software patents restrict innovation in a manner that was never intended to be possible.
Copyright allows you to decide how your code is distributed. Software patents restrict innovation in a manner that was never intended to be possible.
Yes. All human intellectual work comes down to discovering a really big number. This labor has immense value. The data itself can be trivially copied and distributed worldwide at essentially zero cost.
Society needs to find new ways to value this human intellectual labor. New ways that don't depend on forcing artificial scarcity on the result.
> Not only is it an utterly helpful notion
Helpful to whom? To the monopolists, sure. Meanwhile everybody else has been robbed of their fair use and public domain rights.
> enforcing copyright in the 21st century helps us to protect our computing freedom
Absolutely not. The number one reason why computers are no longer under our control is copyright. It is impossible to stop copyright infringement if we can create and run whatever software we want. They must have mechanisms that stop us from running unapproved software in order to have any hope of enforcing anything. Otherwise it's trivial for computers to share data with each other, it's as natural as a river flowing.
If you unlike their software or hardware, then just stop buying it and buy or support free software and hardware. Freedom is not free.
That's a half-measure with limited impact. Why spend considerable resources freeing up a small number of works? The right thing to do is to abolish copyright straight up. At the very least, fix copyright by significantly reducing duration so that copyright ownership is reassigned to the public automatically at zero cost regardless of what monopolists want.
> just stop buying it
People won't have a choice. They'll either buy locked down hardware or they won't be able to consume anything. Streaming services have already started enforcing DRM rules that prevent owners of free software and hardware from consuming their content and it's illegal to circumvent this even if you pay for it.