The important distinction between fashion and software is that clothing is useless unless properly manufactured. The materials and manufacturing process are an integral part of the final product. To duplicate a garment is to reverse engineer it, source the materials, and then remarket it as a knock-off, or as some imitation item under another brand.
Fashion doesn't need strict copyright enforcement because by the time you've reverse engineered something and put it into production, it's already wildly out of date.
You can see how Apple applies this principle to their main products, aggressively innovating so that by the time their products are copied, which is inevitable, they have already obsoleted them.
Software can be duplicated at effectively zero cost to produce an identical copy. It also has a much longer lifespan for mature packages (Office, XP, etc.), where people will use the same software, plus or minus patches, for five years or more.
There needs to be some kind of reasonable limitation on what people are able to do with software that they purchase, so at the very least a form of copyright is required, not unlike protections offered to books.
The real thorn is that software patents are mostly preposterous, with very few requiring actual innovation to produce. It's like trying to patent a plot twist or a character quirk and then suing all authors that use it.
Fashion doesn't need strict copyright enforcement because by the time you've reverse engineered something and put it into production, it's already wildly out of date.
You can see how Apple applies this principle to their main products, aggressively innovating so that by the time their products are copied, which is inevitable, they have already obsoleted them.
Software can be duplicated at effectively zero cost to produce an identical copy. It also has a much longer lifespan for mature packages (Office, XP, etc.), where people will use the same software, plus or minus patches, for five years or more.
There needs to be some kind of reasonable limitation on what people are able to do with software that they purchase, so at the very least a form of copyright is required, not unlike protections offered to books.
The real thorn is that software patents are mostly preposterous, with very few requiring actual innovation to produce. It's like trying to patent a plot twist or a character quirk and then suing all authors that use it.