cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1366698
Richard Stallman was right since the very beginning. Every warning, every prophecy realised. And, worst of all, he had the solution since the start. The problem is not Richard Stallman or the Free Software Foundation. The problem is us. The problem is that we didn’t listen.
Stallman is one of my biggest inspirations. It’s nice that there was a guy who was right about so much for so long when the vast majority of people around him were wrong. I don’t think he’s right about everything, but he’s right about most things. I think he could go further in some ways. For example, I think copyright and patent laws should die.
Stallman doesn’t want anything like that. The GPL for example wouldn’t work without copyright.
What Stallman wants is software patents do be illegal (you can patent your new garden hose as much as you like) and copyright should be returned to what it was, a much shorter term. It’s supposed to give a time limited monopoly on a work in order to make sure the author is encouraged to create new works frequently. Instead it has become a gravy train for life plus a huge number of years after the authors death.
It should return to 5 or 10 years.
Copyright doesn’t need to die, it just needs to become irrelevant. The GPL and Creative Commons depend on copyright law to exist. So if everyone just started using Free Software licenses and Free Culture licenses (which will realistically never happen), the negative consequences of copyright would be minimized. It’s the best of both worlds, really.