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.
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.
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.
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.
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?