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Don't you feel owning the rights to a piece of music is different than owning rights to salt, though? No one has a monopoly on music, because anyone can compos
by palish 19y ago
Don't you feel owning the rights to a piece of music is different than owning rights to salt, though? No one has a monopoly on music, because anyone can compose their own. The same goes with software. It's not artificial like restricting goods; it really is your hard work.
When I said "Copying software is stealing", I was incorrect. What I meant to express was "Copying software is wrong if you can afford to buy it". There's something morally wrong about taking someone's hard work against their wishes and giving it away for free. I don't know what to call it, but don't you at least agree it is wrong?
- paul 19y agoInfringing on people's legal rights is often wrong, but not everything that's wrong (or illegal) should be called "theft".
- palish 19y agoOkay. Is your argument about semantics? I'm fine with renaming the act, but I have no idea what to call it. Do you have a suggestion? Just "illegal copying" perhaps? Also, do you feel the law should punish the act as if someone had shoplifted an item of equivalent value, or some other punishment? I'm worried that if the punishment is a fine, people might risk it anyway because the chance of getting caught seems so small in peer to peer networks.
- paul 19y agoWorking out the right laws and punishments is a difficult problem. Before we can solve the problem, we must understand it. Using misleading terms just causes confusion and leads us in the wrong direction.
- daniel-cussen 19y agoCopyright infringement is never treated the same as property theft. In any jurisdiction. In any case, copyright was not established to help companies like Warner or Scholastic---in fact, it was originally designed to protect authors from having large corporations distribute their stuff without paying authors anything, as opposed to today's model, in which companies pay authors relatively little.
- rfrey 19y agoSalt was an excellent metaphor to choose because it removes scarcity as an issue. Property rights developed in an environment of scarcity: when I take something from you I deprive you of its use. Obviously copyright infringement does not deprive the copyright owner of use of the material. It does diminish the value of the copyright, though. When framed this way, debate can be about the validity of the copyright or intellectual property rather than whether "stealing" is OK. The colonial "copyright" on salt was clearly not justified; a copyright on "one-click" purchases seems silly; the copyright on the Office 2007 ribbon seems more justified. In any case the debate is focussed on what it should be.