When I look back, seems to me the default was sort of "anything can copy and modify anything" because without additional measures or rules... what's stopping them? We added copyright as a time-limited exclusivity available to the creator to encourage people to create things (knowing they would have time to recoup some of their effort commercially).

With anything else (books or stories, pictures or movies, etc) the ability to modify or extend the work was the default. Copyright was a carve-out in this.

With software it's actually the reverse--the ability to modify or extend the work is _not_ the default. It takes explicit action by the creator to make that reasonable without substantial effort in most cases. We're actually dealing with an entirely different situation here, and providing that exclusivity on top really does seem like a bad deal for society in a lot of ways.

Is there anything else that's covered by copyright that's in a similar sort of situation as software? Where the thing that's covered by copyright _isn't_ really modifiable to begin with?

Which is a lot of words to say--on the surface, yeah, I agree with you. Besides shorter terms, I think if you want that exclusivity from society you should be required to give something back in return... like the source code so everyone can benefit from and build off of your work after your period of exclusivity expires.

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ndiddy 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Is there anything else that's covered by copyright that's in a similar sort of situation as software? Where the thing that's covered by copyright _isn't_ really modifiable to begin with?

I don't see how software is unique here. You can modify a compiled executable, just like you can modify a finished graphic, or a produced movie, or a piece of music from an album. It takes additional effort, but so does modifying the graphic without the PSD file, the movie without the editor project files, and the music without the stems.

	▲	mikepurvis 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The original copyright laws date from the 1700s; at the time the only thing being protected was text: stories, essays, reference volumes, etc. Basically, stuff for which there was no "source code" to conceal, the whole thing was right there on the page. It's only been in the 20th century that we've increasingly seen classes of copyrightable works for which the source code dwarfs the final released product: music, digital visual arts, film, and software To make matters even worse, the commercial interest in copyright doesn't care about any of this, because pirates only duplicate and distribute the end product anyway. So it's only the creative side wanting to remix and extend that is shut out by a lack of source escrow.