[billpatrianakos]

Right?! It's unethical to check to see if someone is ripping off your work online? Let me tell a kind of embarrassing story related to this. Some years ago I got into blogging... Like, a lot. And I was checking out all sorts of desktop apps that posted to your blog and I came across one I liked. It was going for about $20 so I got a pirated copy and decided to share it on a certain torrent site. The creators tracked me down and asked me to take it down. They very sanely explained how they worked how to produce this and would like to be able to keep making it better but couldn't if people like me kept ripping them off. They had to police the web and I don't see anything wrong with their actions. I ended up seeing things their way and took it down. They weren't being unethical by asking me not to steal their app. It was me who was being unethical. I'm baffled by that statement.

[slowpoke]

And I'm still baffled that people like you are insisting that

a) this is a problem with piracy, and not - for the umpteenth time now - the brokenness of distribution as a business model in the face of a world where copying is virtually costless. It's not my problem if people still cling to it and are unwilling to adapt.

b) that copying something is stealing (or "ripping someone off"). It's stupid, it's wrong, and most of all it is dishonest. At least call it what it unfortunately is: copyright infringement. I have made it a personal rule to not take anyone serious who calls copying "stealing", as it shows either a total lack of understanding of the matter or deliberate deception.

[earbitscom]

If you founded a company equally with two other people and, after leaving fully vested, they exercised enough shares of stock to reduce your 33% to .0001%, are you going to pussyfoot around semantics when describing this behavior? They haven't taken your shares. It's not technically "stealing". It's dilution.

I'd just love to see it...you running around yelling, "They diluted me!" And then having to explain to others what it means. And then that person saying, "Isn't that stealing?" And you pausing your tantrum to explain to them the difference and how, technically, nothing has been taken from you and that what they did isn't the problem - it's that you need a better business model.

[waqf]

"exercised [...] shares"? That's not a meaningful sentence, so it's not clear what situation you're trying to describe.

In any case, either your partners can (in this example) dilute you or they can't. Neither of these is a fundamentally dishonest situation, you just have to make sure that everybody and their lawyer is on the same page as to which it is (and write your contracts accordingly).

Same with copyrights. People will be understandably aggrieved if they create works believing that the law will protect them and then it doesn't. But if we change the law so that new works created in future are not eligible for copyright protection, there's no such problem (because everybody should know what to expect).

[earbitscom]

Sorry...authorized shares. I guess your commitment to semantics really does outweigh your commitment to productive discourse. I think we're done here.

[graphene]

I think the essential difference is that shares in a company are not pure information that can be reproduced at negligible cost.

Point is that even though "shareholder rights" are somewhat abstract, they are less at odds with the laws of physics than "intellectual property rights".

[billpatrianakos]

In an ideal world we would be able to do away with copyright but I don't see that abolishing is right for everyone. Right now it does make sense for music and movies. That hurts middlemen but not the creators. That's fine. But in the software world it's different. You are hurting the creators.

You're stance on this takes away the rights of creators. The creator's rights are no less important than the consumer's rights.

Copying is not stealing technically but when something that is meant to be paid for gets copied and passed around free it does become stealing. Arguments about software being non-scarce don't apply. When you argue that the developer only has to put in the work to make it once and is getting a free ride because he's just distributing copies well that's just a cop out. It isn't exactly the software itself that people are being charged for. It's what they are able to do with that software that they get charged for as well as the experience of using it. Should authors only be paid for one copy of their book? Why is it wrong to have a choice? Copyright holders don't go around telling people that they can't give away their own work for free so why is it that the anti-copyright crowd insists that creators should not have the choice to charge for what they create and should gladly give away their work for free.

I see and understand the anti-copyright arguments (at least more than half of them). I see the abuses by copyright holders and governments and I don't like it. But at the same time I don't see a way for me, as a developer, to continue to make a living off my work in a world where it's legal for anyone to distribute my work freely against my wishes. If I knew of a way where both interests could be served equally I'd get on board with abolishing copyright. As it stands now I can't do that so I pray that SOPA doesn't pass and hope that we can all find a nice middle ground.

[slowpoke]

>You're stance on this takes away the rights of creators. The creator's rights are no less important than the consumer's rights.

My stance on the matter is that copyright takes away from the general public in the first place. It's not justified, and abolishing therefore means restoring it to the way it's supposed to be. Sorry, but I don't accept copyright as a given something whose abolishing we have to justify. On the contrary, the burden of proof lies on the advocates of copyright to show that it is justified to take away from the general public to hand a monopoly on non-scarce resources to private parties. And I am quite positive that it isn't.

>Copying is not stealing technically but when something that is meant to be paid for gets copied and passed around free it does become stealing.

No, it isn't. Stealing has a strict definition: I take something away from you, which you lack afterwards. Copying involves no loss. No, not "lost profits" either. It's bullshit. Applying the word to copying is just a pathetic appeal to emotion.

Funnily enough, labeling us "pirates" in an attempt to villainize us has probably been the greatest thing the entertainment industry has ever done. It was adapted as a proud, if sometimes self-ironic label, and eventually spawned an entire political movement which now operates in pretty much all western countries with varying degrees of success.

>Arguments about software being non-scarce don't apply.

Oh yes they do. Waving them aside like that doesn't change the fact that existing software is most definitely non-scarce. There's no limit on how much you can copy it. What you are talking about is the creation of software, which falls under the same category as claiming that without copyright, there would be no music.

>Should authors only be paid for one copy of their book?

If you consider writing a book a service, then basically yes, s?he should be payed once. As every other artisan providing services is. There were even business models like that, with varying degrees of success (ask for sum $x, release book under public domain when $x is reached).

>Why is it wrong to have a choice?

If that choice conflicts with reality, then no, you can't have a choice. And reality is that you cannot and should not be able to stop copying and sharing. It's pointless and largely impossible without extremely draconian measures, and, again, highly unethical to attempt to do so.

Oh, and you have quite a choice. You can either release your works and deal with the fact that they will be copied and shared - or you don't release anything.

>so why is it that the anti-copyright crowd insists that creators should not have the choice to charge for what they create and should gladly give away their work for free.

But we are not. We're just saying you can't stop us from sharing. Those are two different, though related things. I can only refer you to the GPL as a good example for this: while you cannot demand access to source per se (and you can charge for a copy of the program if you do so choose), you cannot demand that others stop giving access (share) either. It's basically the golden rule. I cannot demand you to give me a copy of your program. Neither can you demand that I stop giving a copy I received from where-ever to other people. Your rights stop where mine begin. Copyright infringes on my right to share.

>But at the same time I don't see a way for me, as a developer, to continue to make a living off my work in a world where it's legal for anyone to distribute my work freely against my wishes.

Well, that's a pity to heard but ultimately not of interest, as hard as it may sound. As I have said multiple times, distribution as a business model is dead. The horde of copyright-dependent zombies which are still crawling around are a danger to our future society and need to be put to rest as fast as possible. If you can't adapt and find new ways to make ends meet, then I'm afraid you will have to find a new job.

[billpatrianakos]

You make some good points but you and everyone before you who have made those points fail to address one key issue. How does one adapt? If distribution is dead than what's the alternative? Desktop computing will be with us for some time to come and desktop software will continue to be in demand. So now every software developer has to find a new line of work because some people think copyright needs to be abolished? Give me a break. This anti copyright stance is like chopping off your head to cure a headache anyway. Copyright still serves a very useful purpose and is far from evil in and of itself. It's just how it's being used that is the problem. So instead of taking such extreme positions on this why don't we come to our senses and all agree that protections need to be scaled back but not gotten rid of. You wouldn't tell a convenience store they now have to find a new way of doing things because they can't stop the shoplifters.

If copyright is gone then everything is up for grabs and it can have unintended consequences that make the same people who were against it cry out for help. Right now the argument is framed in such a way that it only takes consumers and willing creators into account. There are people who create things that neither want to profit from them nor share them with the world. In a world without copyright you place much more of a burden on those people to lock away their work. Your diary is up for grabs in this type of world and if ever someone felt like publishing it as their own or selling it there'd be nothing you could do about it. That tutorial you wrote on your blog, the one that's free to access to anyone, well that just ended up in an O'Reilly book without credit and no one asked you. Sure, they won't make a killing off it in this world but it's pissing you off and you think "that's just not right".

I'm wondering if all these great ideals the anti-copyright proponents talk about are the true goal or if there's a little bit of jealousy, sour grapes, and inferiority complexes thrown in there. It kind of reminds me of the guy who works at the McDonalds drive thru who talks a lot of shit about rich people and how it's not fair and we need to spread the wealth while he just sits in his drive through hoping his bank account will fill up with piles of cash one day.

What is under copyright protection right now that we can't create around or over or through? Do we really need to base our work off of someone else's to make something better? Doesnt the greatest disruption come about as a result of inconvenient restriction?

Abolishing copyright sounds great and the ideals around it are just beautiful but the world isn't an ideal place and great ideals and philosophies don't really lend themselves all too well to reality when put into practice. So in the meantime why don't we jump back to reality and get SOPA voted down, lobby to scale back copyright instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water and generally just be more realistice about these things.

[slowpoke]

>How does one adapt? If distribution is dead than what's the alternative?

That's not my problem, to be blunt. I'm simply stating the fact that distribution as a business model is dead in the face of unlimited, near-costless sharing of data. It's really the same as with the burden of proof for the need for copyright: it's the task of the ones demanding a business model to find one. Not ours to provide you with one.

>Copyright still serves a very useful purpose and is far from evil in and of itself.

That's your opinion and I do not share it. I consider the very idea of copyright unethical (or in other words, evil), and you will not convince me of the contrary.

>So instead of taking such extreme positions on this why don't we come to our senses and all agree that protections need to be scaled back but not gotten rid of.

This statement works both ways. Why don't we come to our senses and stop the insanity that is copyright already? We can throw phrases like this at each other all day long.

>You wouldn't tell a convenience store they now have to find a new way of doing things because they can't stop the shoplifters.

And again the stealing analogy. Stop it already, repetition does not make something correct. There's a reason theft is unethical, and that is because you take something away from the other person. Copying involves no loss for anybody, there is only gain.

>There are people who create things that neither want to profit from them nor share them with the world.

So? They don't need to publish it then. I do not see any problem. If a lack of copyright forces people to finally think a bit about the security of their data, I'm more than fine with it.

>Your diary is up for grabs in this type of world and if ever someone felt like publishing it as their own or selling it there'd be nothing you could do about it.

If I'm dumb enough to put it on the internet, then I will have to deal with that. It's like crying that people can see what you publicly post on Facebook.

>That tutorial you wrote on your blog, the one that's free to access to anyone, well that just ended up in an O'Reilly book without credit and no one asked you. Sure, they won't make a killing off it in this world but it's pissing you off and you think "that's just not right".

Why would that piss me off? Sure, attribution would be nice, but in the end more people will read my tutorial. I do not see the problem.

>I'm wondering if all these great ideals the anti-copyright proponents talk about are the true goal or if there's a little bit of jealousy, sour grapes, and inferiority complexes thrown in there.

Really now, we're down to lame appeals to spite?

>Do we really need to base our work off of someone else's to make something better?

Why should we reinvent the wheel all the time? Besides, in the case of art, everything is based of something else. There is no art in the void.

>why don't we jump back to reality and get SOPA voted down, lobby to scale back copyright instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water and generally just be more realistice about these things.

Why don't we finally accept reality and get rid of copyright because it is a fundamentally broken concept that makes absolutely no sense in the face of globally available many-to-many communication technologies which enable near-costless sharing of information, like the internet?