| > I value the freedom of hard-working content creators to make money from their labor over the freedom of teenagers to get free copies of popular movies and video games I appreciate how you twisted this. This reveals that you take an ageist position against teenagers. When I was fifteen I knew everything I needed to know about the world and I was studying higher mathematics full time in college. Teenagers can be just as intelligent and productive as anyone else. Despite this, you value the right of movie companies like Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, 20th Century Fox, Disney, Paramount, Warner bros, and Universal Studios to make a profit over the freedom of our teenagers to share with one another. > I don't care of those creators are profit-driven mega-corporations or starving artists. The existing copyright policies are created by profit-driven mega-corporations rather then individual artists because the big corporations have all the political power, so you are implicitly supporting these corporations over individual artists. Programmers would greatly benefit from living in a society where all software is free because they would never have to use a program that alienates them from the process of software production. Operating systems could be rebuilt to eliminate the user/produce distinction and to drastically increase programmer productivity. However, profit-driven mega-corporations like Microsoft and Apple cannot allow that because that would destroy their profit model. Similarly, individual artists would benefit from the freedom to use our accumulated artistic knowledge without being alienated from it by the profit-driven corporations. Mega-corporations don't want that, they want what we have now which is copyright that lasts 120 years after creation. > Thought experiment: in games like World of Warcraft, weapons, armor, etc, are trivially reproducible. I don't have much of an issue with participating in a virtual commodity economy for fun and not to make a profit. Blizzard makes its money off of WoW from subscription fees rather then game economy itself. However, some free-to-play games like Maple Story run cash shops for profit and I oppose the existence of such cash shops as much as I do all other markets that sell artificially scarce goods for a profit. |