I completely disagree, and let me try to explain why. First of all, keep in mind that today we *HAVE* software copyrights. Under US law (and most other countries are similar) all code is copyrighted except the miniscule amounts that written for the US Govt or are intentionally granted to the public domain. (I don’t know of any code old enough to have passed out of copyright due to age, but it may exist.) Occasionally there are even lawsuits over copyright violations — SCO, for instance, accused IBM of copying some of its code and incorporating it into Linux.

To me, it feels somehow “fair” that when one person (or company or whatever) spends hours writing a program, that another cannot simply start using it (without permission). The important difference from patent law is that if person A has copyrighted something and person B wants to do the same thing, they MAY… they just have to do the work themselves. (Copyright law *is* robust enough to handle situations like an attempt to copyright a loop or some other basic pattern — there are allowances for similarity if it really does arise by coincidence not copying.)

This contrasts with patent protection where if person A has patented something then person B is out of luck. No matter how badly B wants it, no matter how hard B works, B isn’t allowed to do that thing without a license from A. And *that* is what obstructs progress.

– Michael Chermside

“In the most striking recent example of the policy shift, the top antitrust official at the Justice Department last month urged state prosecutors to reject a confidential antitrust complaint filed by Google that is tied to a consent decree that monitors Microsoft’s behavior. Google has accused Microsoft of designing its latest operating system, Vista, to discourage the use of Google’s desktop search program, lawyers involved in the case said.”