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Nobody Asked For A Refrigerator Fee
- tzs 15y agoHis analogies all fail, because refrigeration was an alternative to ice. The analogies would only hold if people had been somehow using refrigerators to get ice from the ice companies without paying for it, rather than using it to reduce their need for ice in the first place.
- derobert 15y agoPirating a movie doesn't get the movie from the movie company, for free or otherwise. Instead, the pirate gets it from a friend, random people voluntarily in a bittorrent swarm, etc. Analogies to physics goods are silly because physical goods can not be (cheaply) copied. In the ice analogy, if I get ice from an ice company, the ice company no longer has that ice. If I get a song from you, you still have it. Nitpick: refrigeration was first used as an alternative to shipping ice (make it locally instead). This started in the 1850s and became widespread by the 1870s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigeration#First_refrigeration_systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigeration#First_refrigerati...
- throwaway32 15y agoIntellectual property law is an extremely dangerous thing, the scope of which i feel is not properly appreciated. What if fire was subject to patent fees, what if the works of Shakespeare were held under an indefinite copyright, what if the printing press was hobbled by some kind of "copy prevention system". Nobody innovates in a vacuum, borrowing, and yes, outright "ripping off" of ideas, then improving them has been the keystone of human advancement since the dawn of time. The idea that anybody has been entirely original and owns an idea because of this is offensive and counter to everything that has advanced us from apes.