How so? As I understand it, their terms of service (which of course nobody reads, but they're there) say that anything you post on their sites becomes their property, not yours.
> proprietary software: a category predicated on copyright
No, predicated on not letting other people see the source code. That would be true even if copyrights didn't exist.
> that's the thing I'm arguing against
I'm quite willing to consider arguments against copyrights and patents. But I don't think "abolishing copyrights and patents will make the tech giants behave, or at least take away a bunch of their power" is such an argument. As I said in my previous post, as long as they continue to get the government favoritism they have now, they won't care if copyrights and patents are abolished.
> That's how corporations immediately outcompete individuals.
Again, "corporations" is an extremely broad term. A mom and pop restaurant is a corporation. And yes, it "outcompetes individuals" in the sense that a restaurant where one person tried to do every single task probably wouldn't work very well. But that doesn't make the corporation formed to operate the mom and pop restaurant a bad thing.
> Each of the corporations you mentioned leverages a copyright moat as their core valuation.
I disagree, for reasons I've already given, but I don't see that we're going to resolve that here. I simply don't see copyrights as a significant moat for the big tech giants compared to the other thumbs that are on the scale in their favor.
