[hackathonguy]

In Jewish law there is a paradigm called "this one is benefitting and this one is not losing". Essentially, the idea is that if you're enjoying something belonging to someone else, that doesn't constitute stealing as long as they don't stand to lose anything owing to your usage.

This applies to lamplight, and interestingly, can be applied to piracy as well: if you can honestly say you wouldn't have purchased the movie/software/music anyway, downloading it is not stealing.

As others have mentioned in the comments, this idea doesn't work for wifi: performance is inversely correlated with connected devices, making using your neighbor's wifi a case of "this one is benefitting and this one is losing".

[akomtu]

Not giving back when you can is greed, not theft. But these days we encourage greed, so copyright owners had to frame greed as thef to make it punishable.

[shukantpal]

That's not the definition of greed.

[onethought]

But intellectual property isn’t a thing then.

[akomtu]

Using one metaphor, IP is not a thing, it's a fire: by its nature, when it creates more fire, the original fire does not diminish.

[BeFlatXIII]

I'm fine with that outcome.

[onethought]

Me too, but completely unwinds the software economic model. Licenses are meaningless, as would more broadly copyright.

[Dylan16807]

A lot less than 'completely'. A big chunk of software is commissioned, and another big chunk of software is open source.

[onethought]

… a tiny chunk (by value).

Commissioned software Is a fraction of product/services protected by IP law.

Open source doesn’t really have an effective business model (and it doesn’t need one!)

[Dylan16807]

So much software is in-house, and that's only part of commissioned software, are you sure it's a tiny chunk?