From: tal691@huxley.anu.edu.au (Tonio Loewald)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Why the Piracy? Here's why...
Date: 12 Jan 93 09:57:58 GMT
Organization: Australian National University
NNTP-Posting-Host: 150.203.2.12

freek@phil.ruu.nl (Freek Wiedijk) writes:

>I would prefer a world in which there were no intellectual
>property laws.  I don't think it is unethical to copy
>something.  At least, not when the copying doesn't disturb
>the use of the original item.

The point about knowledge and information is that it is a
public good -- ie. something that isn't a limited resource
and thus can be given to everybody at no cost to anyone.

It doesn't make economic sense to charge for software, but
it does make sense to pay for it to be written. There's
the rub.

>My reasons for this are the following:
>1. It's the status quo.  Everyone _already_ copies everything
>   (from CD's on DAT, to software on disks, to books on
>   paper).
>2. I would like there to be a giant reservoir of knowledge
>   that's free for everyone to add to or take from (e.g., the
>   complete library of congress, digitalized, on the
>   Internet; can you say Xanadu? I knew you could!)  And I
>   mean that _everything_ should be in it (all science, all
>   literature, all music, all art, etc.).  The _main_
>   obstacle for this kind of enterprise is intellectual
>   property law.
>3. If there was no restriction on copying, there would be a
>   much more `darwinistic' evolution in intellectual
>   products.  Inferior programs would stand a much smaller
>   chance of ever being used.  (Example: if Apple software
>   was not protected by copyright law, there would be cheap
>   Macintosh clones, and _no-one_ would use MS-DOS or
>   Windows.)

True, but would the Mac OS have been created?

Let's look at it another way:

As far as I know, Kernighan and Ritchie are not deliriously
wealthy, even though they invented C and this is generally
considered the coolest language in the known universe, at
least by most hackers, and this includes Microsoft which
writes pretty well everything in C or C++.

Bill Gates got where he is today primarily by writing a
BASIC interpreter and then shafting everybody within reach.
(Consider this a paraphrasing of "Hard Drive".)
Oh, and Bill IS deliriously rich.

Now whose behaviour would it be sensible for society to
reward with 5,000,000,000 dollars or so?

If you look at any intellectual property domain, the wrong people
are getting all the money. Our intellectual property laws suck,
and the sooner they're brought to their knees, the better.

>4. The highest grade information that I know is `science'.
>   Try to imagine a world in which you had to _pay_ for each
>   scientific article that you need to look at for your
>   research or if you wanted to build on the results from
>   such an article.  In what state would science be in such a
>   world.  In other words: I prefer the way information is
>   handled in science to the way it's handled in the software
>   industry.

Tonio

-- 
Tonio Loewald | tal691@huxley.anu.edu.au | Life is short. Be nice.
"You can lie/You can cry/For all the good it'll do you, you can
die/But when it's done/And the police come/And they lay you down
for dead/Just remember what I said" (Paul Simon-not the senator)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer