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See, your statement of "charging for software not being immoral" is still a hotly ongoing topic of debate. It's just that the economic architecture that carried
by salawat 5y ago
See, your statement of "charging for software not being immoral" is still a hotly ongoing topic of debate. It's just that the economic architecture that carried us out of a world primarily constrained by material scarcity is being naively applied to an area of one which does not.
Introducing scarcity dynamics where none exist, is to me, one of the most immoral of willful actions to undertake.
- disillusioned 5y agoIsn't the scarcity dynamic simply... shifted left? Your point is that it's trivial to duplicate software and distribute it and there's no (or extremely low) incremental cost in doing so, but we both know the cost of software comes from, you know, people who have spent time to learn how to write software and then dedicating their waking hours to do so for years on end. There's scarcity in the number of developers available to perform that job. Now, a situation where I agree with the core thesis of "to introduce scarcity dynamics where none exist" is around, say, virtual real estate, or the most obvious one of them all: NFTs.
- modeless 5y agoI am actually sympathetic to this view somewhat. Copyright is not an inalienable right, it's something that we decided as a society to grant to people because we think the benefits outweigh the costs, and that may not be true. Personally I would be in favor of radical changes to copyright such as reducing the duration to something like 5 years. Artificial scarcity is useful but life+70 years of artificial scarcity is far beyond reasonable.