| Antabus said:
2) Public domain is public domain. If a game is public domain, then you can copy it legally. If you borrow a book from a friend, your friend or the person who he has acquired the said book from has compensated for acquiring the ownership of the product. If you take the book from the legal owner without his or her agreement, you steal it. If the legal owner (your friend) agrees to loan/gift/sell the book to you, you are not stealing it. Same thing goes for the used dvd, original author has already forfeitet the ownership of the said product to the person who has acquired it. You will pay for the ownership, so it is not stealing. Again. 3) If you use the program within of what is said on the license, you are using it legally. That is, once again - not stealing.
Your examples are piss poor and so is your reasoning for accepting piracy. |
I think the problem is that you didn't get the real point of my examples, that is the difference in economy and ethics between physical items and information.
A physical book is a material object, that obviously can be owned by e.g. a private individual. That does not entitle that owner of the paper and ink with rights over the "intellectual content", that is the words on the page. Which rights are restricted by copyright regulations.
When I borrow the book from a friend and read it I'm acquiring that intellectual content, even though I'm not acquiring the ownership on paper and ink and returning the actual book. If that intellectual acquisition does not end up in me buying that same book, the net result is two events of information consumption, one book sold. If my friend lends his book to twenty people, he might be causing the authors to lose up to twenty sales.
Same happens when a DVD, book, or game is resold and bought used. You are technically right in saying that it's legal. And still, it's a way for users to gain consumption of content in which only the first owner has compensated the authors.
Again, the point is: information is not like physical objects. Talking about "stealing" is intellectually naive and legally incorrect. Authors have a right to be compensated for their intellectual work, the community at large benefits from it and legislation and economy has to find new ways to make that happen that follow the technical and social changes.
Draconian copyright legislation that allows so many ways to consume content without helping the authors, but forbids consumption of some digital content that has no commercial availability don't help in this sense. As such I have no ethical problem acting against it - as in practice it's like borrowing it from a friend who got her hands on an old instance - and logically legislation itself will have to adapt.
