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.”
Yeah, we’d have to shift tactics. But, without IP law protections, the hacker community would double down on reverse engineering and binary patching. Debian etc. would still be available, but you’d also see spins on Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and Google software based on decompiling, patching, and rebuilding, or just game genie / PC game cracks binary patching based on offset and signature.
The DMCA would dissolve and encrypted data that was expected to be decrypted on the fly (“streaming only”) would just be published fully decrypted.
It would be a revolutionary shift, but I’m not convinced it would be worse.
What would be worse is keeping IP law, but only having it enforced by million dollar yearly budget teams of lawyers and not protecting creators from having their works fed to “AI” and regurgitated as slop.