4 ms·
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 imp
by gd1 10y 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 10y agoCopyright 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.