Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block), sparked a weekend’s worth of debate around intellectual property, patents, and copyright, with a characteristically terse post declaring, “delete all IP law.”
X’s current owner Elon Musk quickly replied, “I agree.”
It’s an interesting point that without any IP law, GPL would be invalid and corporations could use and modify things like Lemmy without complying with the license.
Exactly. They wouldn’t be obligated to contribute back at all, so someone like Meta could just rebrand Lemmy into something else and throw ads everywhere.
They already could. Lemmy’s users are not the ones who run the software. It’s like Google’s usage of Linux. They can keep their changes to themselves.
They can only keep them to themselves if they don’t distribute the changes. Since Google distributes Android, they need to release their changes to Linux on Android under the GPL. Since they don’t distribute their server code, they don’t need to share their changes.
But then corporations could not stop anyone from modifying their modifications to things like Lemmy.
Well, they wouldn’t need to release those changes publicly.
But then anyone could take them anyway.