Until now. The latest iteration of artificial intelligence has captured the attention of politicians around the world. It seems that the latter can’t do enough to promote and support it, in the hope of deriving huge economic benefits, both directly, in the form of local AI companies worth trillions, and indirectly, through increased efficiency and improved services. That current favoured status has given AI leaders permission to start saying the unsayable: that copyright is an obstacle to progress, and should be reined in, or at least muzzled, in order to allow AI to reach its full potential.
Open source everything. Problem solved? No more patents. Problem solved? IP becomes people owned. Problem solved?
Open source generally depends quite heavily on copyright, though. None of the copyleft licenses work without it.
Open source licenses came about because of copyrights. If people didn’t try to hoard information, the GPL never would have been needed in the first place.
Not actually the case. GPL’s “viral” nature depends on copyright prohibiting the use of the code you publish without agreeing to the GPL’s conditions. Without copyright you could take GPLed code and use it in a closed-source program without publishing your own version or licencing it under the GPL. Most copyleft licenses are like that, including stuff like the Creative Commons.
the GPL does not protect against information hoarding
Maybe I phrased it wrong?
Considering who lobbies for and enforces copyright these days (rich assholes) and the amount put into anti-piracy and anti-sharing campaigns I don’t think it’s helping much in those areas. Companies these days often violate GPL with little to no consequence (name one time a company got in trouble and there’s probably 100 that didn’t).