On 09-Feb-2008, Reinhard Mueller wrote:
Am Samstag, den 09.02.2008, 12:53 +1100 schrieb Ben Finney:
In other words, if copyright truly did not exist, and everyone had the same freedoms (and more) in every work, not just those that have such freedoms explicitly granted by the GPL, then there would no longer need to be a GPL.
I don't think so. Without copyright, everybody still had the chance to hide the source and only publish the binaries. Everybody still had the chance to write software that only works on specific hardware, to write software that checks BIOS serial numbers, or whatever.
Without copyright, there's no copyright law preventing anyone who gets their hands on the source code — like, say, someone working with the entity that would otherwise be the copyright holder — from distributing that source code to whomever pays them.