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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  3396 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Can we cogently refute "stealing is stealing"?

Intellectual property is a bullshit notion. I do not deny you a file by making a copy of it. This is not a moral issue, it's a policy issue. Calling sharing copies of files "stealing" or "piracy" is just rhetorical trickery. The only really relevant question is whether society benefits more from allowing organizations to claim ownership of culture, allowing them to fund its production by charging for access, or from being able to share it freely among ourselves. Anyone saying "none of your excuses or rationalizations will refute the fact that you're stealing when you make an unauthorized copy of something" is either a sophist or a rube.





wasoxygen  ·  3396 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Intellectual property is a bullshit notion. I do not deny you a file by making a copy of it.
You are not denying me anything, but you are denying something to the content creator: compensation for the work of creation according to the terms by which that person made (or intended to make) the content available to you.

If you plan to earn a salary in computer science, you or someone will have to find customers to pay for what you create. If technology allows unlimited perfect copies to be made of your creation, and the customers see it as perfectly ethical to use these copies without paying for them, it seems like a non-trivial problem to keep you in work.

(I work in IT, and I "make unauthorized copies" of content like books and music. I think it's usually wrong.)

user-inactivated  ·  3396 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I do earn a salary as a software developer. Our clients get charged on the basis of how much time it takes us to solve their problems, not for the software itself. The minority of software in the world is sold as products to consumers.

wasoxygen  ·  3396 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Software companies have had to innovate with their business models specifically because they produce a product which is easy to duplicate. This does not mean that the duplication is moral or immoral.

Suppose you had two clients with identical needs. One client says to the other, "Hey, instead of paying BFV Inc., we can just burn you a CD with the solution they provided for us, and next time you can return the favor."

This might be beneficial to society (initially), but it hurts your business. You might consider coming to an agreement with your clients to discourage this kind of behavior. The fact that it may be easy for people to get the value of your work without compensating you does not make it ethical.

IP is an imperfect tool, like a padlock on a warehouse, that some producers rely on to make a living by selling their time, talent and effort.

user-inactivated  ·  3396 days ago  ·  link  ·  

A lawyer does not get compensated when another reuses his argument in a later case.

wasoxygen  ·  3395 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It's a good point. In that case, I don't see the original lawyer having a very strong complaint.

To distort it a bit, suppose the lawyer spent many days preparing for a case, then prepped the client before the court date, sharing the entire strategy. The client then dismissed the lawyer without paying and hired a cheapo lawyer, providing the new lawyer with a ready-made case. That would be pretty shady, even if there was no formal agreement against such behavior.

user-inactivated  ·  3396 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It didn't use to be that way (perhaps back in 2002 people were still mostly selling software), but over a period of time (to about 2009-2010, maybe?) it became the norm.

user-inactivated  ·  3396 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It has always been that way. Internal applications used by businesses, government, universities and other institutions aren't as visible, but they've always made up the bulk of software being written.

user-inactivated  ·  3396 days ago  ·  link  ·  

True. But has it been true from the perspective of a regular consumer outside of one of those large institutions? That's the perspective I was talking about before, and to me, personally, it seems to have shifted from around those time periods onward.

user-inactivated  ·  3396 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Do you mean that the software consumers not part of an institution has access to has been software sold as a product to them? I guess that's probably true, if you ignore the work of the free software community. What significance do you see in that though?

user-inactivated  ·  3396 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Wait, never mind, I've totally misunderstood what you were talking about.

user-inactivated  ·  3396 days ago  ·  link  ·  
This comment has been deleted.
user-inactivated  ·  3396 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Most software that makes money nowadays makes it in the form of providing services around the software rather than providing the software itself, or at least that's my impression from my own experiences with tech nowadays. I barely see anyone still selling the software itself, on its own.