Philosophical Quandry: Piracy

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by PvK:
In the one case, the public decided to buy a million copies of the work, and someone else got the money. (Reminds me of the current corporate model.)

In the other case, no one thought the work was worth the price, but a million people thought it was interesting enough to copy.

Seems like a big difference to me.

Actually in the second it may have been worth the price. But why pay for it if you can get it for free and not be breaking the law?

I think I agree with Tesco. If he is saying that after five years you can freely copy it as long as you don't sell it, but before five years you aren't allowed to copy it. I think that is reasonable. Five years is a LONG time for software.

But Pvk if I understand you correctly, you are advocating changing the law so that there is no recrimination whatsoever for copying the software at any time as long as it's not being sold. If it wasn't agasist the law to make a copy of software why would anyone ever buy it? Even great software that you love and would pay for if you had to. You'd be stupid to pay for it if you could get it free wouldn't you?

Just because copying is easy and stopping it is hard doesn't mean it's ok and we shouldn't try.

Basically all software would be shareware. And how often do shareware authors make any money? Of course a few have made some. Aaron did himself with SE3. But not enough to do this full time.

Geoschmo