I mostly addressed this in a sibling comment, but I wanted to add that if copyright wasn't preventing companies from copying and building upon the works of others, I find it likely that the industry would be more free and competitive.

Source code is a recipe. You can't copyright recipes by themselves, but that hasn't caused any sort of chilling effect in the food and hospitality industries.

I agree with you that removing copyright protections breaks the GPL. What I think most responses to my comment miss is that we wouldnt NEED the GPL without copyright. Copyleft only exists so that copyright cannot be used by companies against users.

I know Stallman isnt the most popular on this forum, but history has sorta proven he was right, time after time.