Always interesting to see discussions around copyright when it comes to developers. The new generation has a new view on sharing and money as it stands. They want to make it easy to share content and software and also make it easy at the same time to enable independent monetization. This generation is the generation that goes on youtube and makes reinterpretations of other people's music, that create narrated play-throughs through interactive entertainment media like computer games, that provide lessons involved other people's content etc. This is so true. I release mostly MIT licensed software and I wouldn't mind if copyrights were restricted or abolished. When I was first learning about licenses I was very idealistic about it but now I'm much more practical.People that license software under the BSD or MIT license probably would not mind that much if copyrights would be abolished or greatly restricted. Richard Stallman's world on the other hand would would fall apart. He even made a statement about how the Pirate Party will backfire on Free Software.
RMS objected to the Swedish Pirate Party's platform on one specific point, which the article simply glossed over in its effort to paint RMS as pro-copyright, but it's worth noting exactly what that point is. Thus, the Pirate Party's proposal would give proprietary software developers the use of GPL-covered source code after 5 years, but it would not give free software developers the use of proprietary source code, not after 5 years or even 50 years. The Free World would get the bad, but not the good. The difference between source code and object code and the practice of using EULAs would give proprietary software an effective exception from the general rule of 5-year copyright — one that free software does not share. The platform seems explicitly designed to be anti-free-software in this regard. RMS is the one being practical here, he doesn't want to make a move that will only weaken us. You have to recognize that half-measures that do nothing but deprive us of our own collective capital are harmful. If we attack copyright directly, it has to be all or nothing.So what would be the effect of terminating this program's copyright after 5 years? This would not require the developer to release source code, and presumably most will never do so. Users, still denied the source code, would still be unable to use the program in freedom. The program could even have a “time bomb” in it to make it stop working after 5 years, in which case the “public domain” copies would not run at all.