> If people who write books for financial gain decide to quit, I'm not sure it's a big loss.
Plenty of people write software for free. Why don't we just use all software however we like? If people who write software for financial gain decide to quit would it be such a loss?
If software copyright ceased to exist, there would still be work for professional programmers: I want software that does X. There is no free software that does X. What are my choices? Write it myself, or pay somebody to write it for me.
If I pay you to write software for me to use, then you release that software to the public, then I got the software I wanted and you got paid for it, by me. Everybody is square, everybody comes out ahead.
It is never good to explain something in terms of what it is not and it is better to travel towards some place new than to travel away from something. If you build your philosophy or movement on [say] anti-capitalism success can be glorious as always but in the long run you will need real life examples of capitalism for any of your arguments to make sense.
One might dream of all software and books being free from copyright in the same way but it works even better the other way around.
If we take the natural order of things. [say] plants replicating themselves with mammals grazing on them or birds dropping delicious eggs all over the place...
What kind of complete imbecile would attempt to control that?
The topic most worthy of debate isn't the events, it might not even be the discussion about people who desire to reap the benefits from forcing others to behave against their own interest.
The real topic is people who desire to accomplish something that is not and will never be possible.
They have been at it not since 1790 but FOREVER! People have always attempted to deny access to knowledge and stop technological progress. Even other peoples entertainment must happen on their terms.
The copyright circus is not about authors getting paid. It is marketing slang for the Spanish inquisition.
We can massage the words to make them sound more appealing but the purpose of technology is what it does. This is every bit as terrifying as it sounds.
The purpose of splitting the atom is to erase all life on this planet over primitive mammalian territory disputes.
Even the most sophisticated things we do can be traced back to supper primitive instinctive behavior that (in its defense) took 4 billion years to calibrate.
It is not that we don't know how to care for others but it is hard to balance it with reproduction.
If we make life easy and comfortable for everyone they are going to reproduce until non of that remains.
Thus we have this drive to make others miserable while completely unaware of why exactly we do this: I got a good thing going for myself - fuck everyone else!
We've build giant automatons to make ourselves miserable!
yeah, we just duplicate and share all of those books that you like to think of as your personal property. Sucks to be you doesn't it? It was not like your motivations were honorable or even reasonable.
Imagine how we created the rule of law and how all that had to step aside so that inspectors can search your home for a radio or TV because you didn't pay for a license.
Out of the way, we have illegal books to burn!... and scholars!
Piracy? Surely you mean heresy?
In conclusion I think, in an argument between barely civilized men, you choice of methods for winning the debate shouldn't sink as low as your opponents but it is fair to meet them half way. No need to torture them into a confession, burn them at the stake or the horrific censorship of their dialog. We can just mock them while copying the books and the movies and rewriting the software from scratch. After all, we are the nice people, its so nice from us that we allow these neo-inquisitors to talk their little talk in public. How they want to do just a little bit of infringement by searching your property, perhaps not burn the heretic today but at least fine little jimmy a few hundred thousand. We can just laugh behind our hand when they talk their little talk.
How dare we have bigger things to worry about: Preserving the ecosystem, infesting other worlds and we should eventually be able to fix the population issues by extending life by just a few hundred years.
haha, I just type faster than I can think. I would normally rewrite things a few times but I felt it captured my thoughts well enough. And since they are to deep or to all over the place (however you want to see it) for this forum why bother refining it? Ill remember not to write/post/share my perspective more often as to not disturb the group think.
And a lot of worst of modern day Linux & Open Source is those big tech corporations pushing their own agendas... Linux might even be better off being a hobby again.
Which is great for this conversation, because it proves that it isn't absolutely necessary for software copyright to exist in order for people to get paid to write it.
Plenty of people write software for free. Why don't we just use all software however we like? If people who write software for financial gain decide to quit would it be such a loss?