meaning of "using" software is running it and doing stuff with it, not taking its code and building something else from it. (The meaning of "ethical" is strongly dependent on what the speaker's actual system of ethics is, and so does not have a universally accepted meaning at that level that you can legitimately accuse someone of subverting) @Winter 'Arbitrage over internet domain names was done this way. Success depended on catering to the parties with most money. The "court" that let the richest party win got most popular' -- what's missing from this picture, for a free market based solution, is an alternative set of root servers, which will honor different decisions and therefore return different results for contested domains. Of course, a sane person considers this to be a natural monopoly. @Michael Deutschmann "A moral philosopher would find the limited net to be inconsistent, as it either punishes a child for the sins of its father, or punishes women for the sake of a moral non-entity." This is not _my_ position, and it's getting to be rather off-topic, but _as I understand_ the reasoning of people who have that position, they resolve this by saying the choice of having consensual sex (which is absent in those exception cases) creates an irrevocable commitment to the possibility of having a child. This is argued to be consistent with the mainstream view of the child support obligation on the father. People will pay for property laws because everybody wants property. Property