[lannisterstark]

>I find the culture of “ownership” of ideas morally repugnant

I see that we're starting off with a misrepresentation already. Copyright isn't a patent.

Copyright isn't solely ownership of 'ideas,' it's ownership of actual work. You cannot 'copyright' an idea.

> It’s just your culture.

I'm sure when it's the 'culture' of every single country in the world, it's an alright culture.

>I’m willing to tolerate

> That’s not culture I perpetuate or encourage.

See what's great about this is that your extremist ideas are in a minority, and you do not get to make the laws. So what you're willing to 'tolerate' or not is irrelevant. No one is looking to you to 'encourage' or 'perpetuate' the culture. Demonizing artists by going "You don't own your own work, I should be able to own it, I made this!" will only get you so far.

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You shouldn't have free reign to profit off of artistic hard work of someone else without a way for them to benefit from that as well.

[EvanAnderson]

> You shouldn't have free reign to profit off of artistic hard work of someone else without a way for them to benefit from that as well.

You were indoctrinated into this world view and believe it to be a natural law. I was not and I don’t.

You seem pretty angry that somebody would think differently, too.

I can’t conceive of looking at the world that way and being morally okay with it.

[kelnos]

Just goes to show you that morals are relative, and have no absolute standing as to what's "okay" and what isn't.

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I can say I'm not angry about this at all (frankly, it feels like you're the one with the axe to grind here). I don't know about indoctrination; certainly I am a product of my environment, at the very least.

But I guarantee you that if copyright weren't a thing, the catalog of creative works in the world would be a tiny fraction of what it is today. And that would continue to be the case unless the human race can get to a point of post-scarcity, where we don't have to work to put food on the table or roofs over our heads, or have a decently nice standard of living.

Because the majority of people in the world who make things that fall under copyright would not be financially able to keep creating those things if they couldn't make money off of it. And sure, there are sometimes ways to make money off creative works without relying on copyright, but I don't think those ways cover enough to be meaningful.

[lannisterstark]

>You seem pretty angry that somebody would think differently, too.

I'm not angry at all, I just don't see the world purely in black and white as you seem to do. On the other hand, you're the one throwing around words such as "indoctrinated" and all that.

I mean, you're the one who insinuated that it should be 100% okay for me to write a work with 100k words, and you taking those words, adding 200 more words, calling the story 'yours' and profiting off it. If THAT is what you believe 'natural law' is, then I'm absurdly glad that it does not work that way.

>I can’t conceive of looking at the world that way and being morally okay with it.

I can't conceive of having a morality that is basically "it should be okay to take/steal other people's works and do whatever you want with them, regardless of that person's feeling in that matter."

This is why we have open source licenses for people who WANT to grant others that ability to do so. You, as someone who has arguably been in the industry for so long, should be fairly familiar with it.