Copylefts only have teeth because of these "stupid" IP laws. Free Software would be nowhere without copyright. (Yes, you could redistribute binaries, but you could not compel the release of source code for derivatives.)
Let's assume the worst. Some company wants to make a photoshop competitor. They don't want to invest too much money into a internally developed project that will very likely fail. They disregard the GPL and fork the GIMP codebase without releasing the source code. Now a few months later they release their software at a $60 pricetag.
Those bastards! They stole all of our hard work to make some money! Now there are two possible scenarios. It will fail because they can't compete with GIMP which can be obtained at a $0 pricetag and respects their freedom. The user can have their cake and eat it too!
That's a pretty tough nut to crack but what if people actually end up buying the software? The only explanation would be that the fork presents added value that is worth paying money for!
In both scenarios the end user cannot lose. They either get higher quality software that suits their needs or software for free that respects their freedom.
Very interesting point which I'm sure gets overlooked quite often. It seems even Richard Stallman is in favor of preserving the idea of copyright (albeit reducing its duration), which came as a bit of a surprise to me given his otherwise radical views: http://www.computerworlduk.com/blogs/open-enterprise/could-f...
Well one interesting thing about Stallman's "radical" views is that, unless I'm missing something, he doesn't actually advocate any kind of governmental action or laws to support his views (aside from shortening copyright duration as you mentioned). He wants people to voluntarily demand and require Free software; he never talks about having the government force it on people in any way.
Now contrast this to many other people, including the people in favor of stronger IP law, who want the government to enact their views into law.
Now what's really bad is that Stallman is the less pragmatic and realistic of these two camps, because he wants regular people to "see the light" and voluntarily subscribe to his views, which obviously isn't happening (he's been at this for 3 decades now, and while Free software has made traction for sure (e.g. Linux kernel in most smartphones and many other devices), users seem to have less real freedom than ever thanks to locked bootloaders, app stores, etc.). By contrast, the jerks who want to force more DMCA-style silliness and even lengthier (effectively perpetual) copyright terms are more realistic because their approach actually works: we have or are getting all these bad laws.
This somehow reminds me of the quote by Shaw about all progress depending on the unreasonable man.
I'd argue that you don't need the whole set of "IP laws" that are being complained-about, in order for free-software to function correctly. IP law has grown into a gigantic hydra monster.
200 years ago when IP had volume costs associated with it, where there was no way for creator to interact with consumer, they were useful. Flawed, but served their purpose.
Today, the purpose is lost, and the use is exploitative.
The original purpose was to incentivize creative works, and the desirability of that hasn't really gone away. For example, Free software would be a lot further along if there could be a lucrative business model behind it.
Enforcement is just utterly at odds with physics and at this point, the idea of "owning" control of bits in someone else's possession is incompatible with a free society.
"The first copyright law was a censorship law. It was not about protecting the rights of authors, or encouraging them to produce new works. Authors' rights were in little danger in sixteenth-century England, and the recent arrival of the printing press (the world's first copying machine) was if anything energizing to writers. So energizing, in fact, that the English government grew concerned about too many works being produced, not too few. The new technology was making seditious reading material widely available for the first time, and the government urgently needed to control the flood of printed matter, censorship being as legitimate an administrative function then as building roads."
There are plenty of lucrative business models behind free software - look at anything from Red Hat, who uses support contracts to fund development, to Krita, which uses crowdfunding each year to fund full time development. And within that spectrum you have projects like Qt, which offers proprietary licensing to appease lawyers to fund development of what will soon be a fully open source toolkit. Gitlab is doing fine despite their platform being open source, too.
At that, I agree that when you are offered a government enforced monopoly on information, that will be much easier to extort revenue from users with than trying to use one of these alternative means of funding development and profiting from information creative work. But like you said, its wholly imaginary and artificial.
This requires equating “stupid” with “all”. Once you recognize a concept of copyright, lawsuits are inevitable once you allow users to share files.
All you need at that point is one copyright holder who believes – right or wrong – that you are in sufficiently zealous about protecting their content and, poof, lawsuit. This goes treble if you have money and the actual infringer is likely to be a broke college student in another country.
