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It does feel wrong, but it feels equally wrong that the government orders the police to prevent citizen from copying bytes.

by tajen 11y ago

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
The social and cultural value of something is related to the cost of production, not the cost of distribution. The fact that the distribution cost is close to zero is irrelevant. The problem with copyright is that a big proportion of the price charged is basically cartel/gatekeeper protection money, and has no useful relationship to the true social cost/value of creative work.
- gd1 11y ago
  You can spin it however you want, but if you are keeping something of worth artificially scarce when it is in fact infinitely abundant, you are deliberately impoverishing the human race. The rules of our economy, supply and demand, break down when supply is infinite... but that is a problem with the economic system that needs to be fixed (perhaps a state funded patronage model?), it's not something that pirates need to feel guilty about. Copyright law reduces the net wealth of the world. It is just plain evil.
  - dalke 11y ago
    Copyright law does not reduce the net wealth of the world. Before I wrote book X, there were no copies of book X in the world. The supply was zero, not infinite. After I wrote book X, the supply was one. Then it grows as people make copies. Copyright law can limit the growth, certainly. (Or enhancement, as the potential profits help promote distribution.) But copyright law is meant to encourage the growth from 0 to 1 by making it possible to make money from the growth from 1 to N, before the lack of copyright protection makes it effectively infinite. It's true that plenty of people will write even without getting paid. It's also true that plenty of people wrote because they will get paid. Heinlein started writing to pay off his mortgage. Copyright law is also the basis for free software. If you take away copyright law, you end up supporting proprietary software distributed only as compiled machine code, not reusable source. This to "impoverishes" the human race.

It does feel wrong, but it feels equally wrong that the government orders the police to prevent citizen from copying bytes.

by tajen 11y ago

It does feel wrong, but it feels equally wrong that the government orders the police to prevent citizen from copying bytes.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago

The social and cultural value of something is related to the cost of production, not the cost of distribution. The fact that the distribution cost is close to zero is irrelevant. The problem with copyright is that a big proportion of the price charged is basically cartel/gatekeeper protection money, and has no useful relationship to the true social cost/value of creative work.

gd1 11y ago
You can spin it however you want, but if you are keeping something of worth artificially scarce when it is in fact infinitely abundant, you are deliberately impoverishing the human race. The rules of our economy, supply and demand, break down when supply is infinite... but that is a problem with the economic system that needs to be fixed (perhaps a state funded patronage model?), it's not something that pirates need to feel guilty about. Copyright law reduces the net wealth of the world. It is just plain evil.
- dalke 11y ago
  Copyright law does not reduce the net wealth of the world. Before I wrote book X, there were no copies of book X in the world. The supply was zero, not infinite. After I wrote book X, the supply was one. Then it grows as people make copies. Copyright law can limit the growth, certainly. (Or enhancement, as the potential profits help promote distribution.) But copyright law is meant to encourage the growth from 0 to 1 by making it possible to make money from the growth from 1 to N, before the lack of copyright protection makes it effectively infinite. It's true that plenty of people will write even without getting paid. It's also true that plenty of people wrote because they will get paid. Heinlein started writing to pay off his mortgage. Copyright law is also the basis for free software. If you take away copyright law, you end up supporting proprietary software distributed only as compiled machine code, not reusable source. This to "impoverishes" the human race.