Post #2900952

2026-04-18 14:32 UTC

@LordCaramac@discordian.social @bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org @ossguy@fedi.copyleft.org @richardfontana@mastodon.social If you are talking about my personal wishes, I would agree. Personally, I perceive of FOSS as a *reaction to* allowing copyright and other intellectual restrictions laws to apply to software. This puts me at odds with some other copyleft advocates. I see copyleft as useful because it "turns the teeth of the machine against itself". If you have copyright, then great, we will use it to have a way to force the commons to stay open. But it would be better to have no copyright at all, and if we could give it up, I would give it up. But it's a far-fetched dream that it could happen. Maybe it will. I am not so sure. If it truly is possible to "copyright launder" any work through an LLM, we'd be as close to it as we ever could be. But again, whatever scenario, in my view, has to be equitable. If it's possible to do that to GPL'ed software, it's only just to be possible to do it to any proprietary software, including reverse engineering binaries.

Replies (2)

@noisytoot@berkeley.edu.pl 2026-04-18 14:47

@cwebber@social.coop @LordCaramac@discordian.social @bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org @ossguy@fedi.copyleft.org @richardfontana@mastodon.social In a world without copyright (assuming no other changes), nothing would prevent people from withholding source code and attempting to restrict people’s freedom by technical means (DRM). On the other hand, it would also be entirely legal to reverse engineer everything and bypass the DRM. Copyright should be removed, but DRM and providing binaries without source code should also be made illegal. Also why is your post language set to de?

Open ##2900953
@ossguy@fedi.copyleft.org 2026-04-18 15:29

@cwebber@social.coop @LordCaramac@discordian.social @bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org @richardfontana@mastodon.social Sadly it will be years before we have an answer re copyright and we can't wait for that. Outlining usage in the meantime is the best we can do, in case we need to do something with that later. We know proprietary software companies are using these tools extensively, so this is in effect a mutually assured destruction situation. While we wait, we should make sure that we are pushing freedom on all other axes, since they won't do that part.

Open ##2900960