In my case, you may consider anything written by me to be released into the public domain. I don't accept the notion of intellectual property rights[1].
Now, I would consider it dishonest to post a project with large parts of code taken from someone else's work without giving credit, and I am inclined to respect others' feelings and wishes. So you probably don't have to worry about me doing things you don't want with your ideas. But there is no way that I'm going to pretend that downloading my source code means agreeing to a binding contract with me, for which I get to prosecute you in court if you break it. If someone insisted that I use a license, I'd probably go for the WTFPL: http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/
Can't say I agree with your thoughts so far. And I am not sure how we as a society would benefit from ditching IP notions.
I get the sense you believe that it's a huge waste of time a nothing more than a money pit for legal expenses. I believe if they went away then the openness that we are experiencing in this day and age would dry up.
When a house craftsman comes to my house and builds me a stairwell, I can't take his work and re-sell it. If I could, then he would quickly go out of business.
You speak of being "somewhat creative" in order to get compensation, but the reality is that the playing field becomes so uneven that the dived between the rich (in this case often the corrupt) and poor becomes greater. That's not a good thing.
> I am not sure how we as a society would benefit from ditching IP notions.
Indirectly, by having a more consistent legal system. As I said, I believe pretty strongly in property rights, and I believe IP is inconsistent with property rights. Debate about either of those things is probably way off topic for the Arc Forum, even more so than it would be for Hacker News.
As for the rest of your arguments, they're all of the form "there are unfortunate consequences". I can take each one of them and argue that it wouldn't be as bad as you think--sometimes because it'd be bad for some people for a while, but people would adapt and we'd all probably be better off at the end of it--as is usually the case with technological revolutions. I could explain myself in more detail and give examples, and in fact I began to do so, but, again, this is probably not the place for such a debate. Suffice to say that I have reasons for my opinions; I've done a lot of reading, thinking, and arguing on the subject (with myself, with the things I read, and with friends); and in an extended debate, you'd probably concede that at least my reasoning made sense even if you didn't agree with some of my premises.
Well, I've stated my opinion, and beyond that, the matter has little practical importance. As I said, I'm inclined to respect people's wishes, and if I copy and paste anyone's code here, it's little trouble for me to copy and paste the text of the copyright and license or whatever as well. (It would only be a problem if you were using the GPL or something, which I believe is supposed to require me to release my entire project under the GPL.) And it certainly shouldn't be a problem when I give code to you guys.
It's fair to say this is not arc language topic, so I will try to not extend it. It really is an interesting topic. For the record, I am not against your ideas, I just not able to marry the ideas up to the results.
I can't say I like the concept of encouraging openness through censorship (which is basically how IP works, right?), but I think you're spot on there. I don't know the reality, but the rich have better marketers to determine how best to profit off of an idea and how best to make that profiting seem polite to the original creator. There are already times someone makes a deal with Hollywood and doesn't like the result; I don't think that's distinguishable from someone who doesn't get to have a say in any deal in the first place.
It would be nice if there were another option like the anarchic politeness waterhouse describes, but I think IP is the natural next step from that, being a law system to help courts encourage/enforce politeness on behalf of people who don't have enough marketing dollars or military power to encourage it themselves.
