No One Is in Charge at the US Copyright Office

Simplistically yes, because many see copyright as the thing that protects corporate interest from the social hacker.

The reality of course is more complicated. Without copyright there's no GPL. Which I guess is fine if you're in the OSS camp more than the FSF camp. MIT and BSD licenses basically (functionally) give up copyright.

Copyright is also what allows for hybrids like the BSL which protect "little guys" from large cloud providers like AWS etc.

Copyright allows VC startups to at least start out life as Open Source (before pivoting later.)

Of course thus is all in the context of software copyright. Other copyrights (music, books etc) are equally nuanced.

And there are other forms of IP protections as well (patents, trademarks) which are distinct from the copyright concept.

So no, I don't think most people here are against copyright (patents are a different story.)

GPL was always about fighting the system with its own tools. The end goal is not good licenses but free software as a baseline.

How else would you enforce Free Software, though? Without copyright, I cannot release the source to my software and require anything of any recipient.

It would be nice of FOSS was the baseline, but I don't see that ever happening, especially in a world without an enforcement mechanism.

That's the thing you don't need to enforce anything if there is no law which forbids you from doing things. It's the copyright law which restricts you from doing most of the things that GPL license gives you permission. GPL gives you back the rights to copy, modify, create derivative works and redistribute any GPL licensed software you receive. Without copyright law you could copy, modify, create derivative works and redistribute any software you receive.

Sure having source code would be nice, but then again half the software nowadays is using electron and written in javascript anyway. Also plenty of examples of hardware manufacturers using software/firmware copyright as excuse and making legal threats to people who have made their own software to control hardware they bought even though they didn't have access to original source code.

There are probably more examples of people reverse engineering an reimplementing or decompiling large nontrivial software than there examples of companies making their whole software open source due to using a GPL licensed library (as opposed to avoiding the GPL licensed code or violating the GPL by not releasing the source code).