Re: What is "piracy" and is it ever justified
 

I think bridge example is rather good, except that you should note that bridge itself is physical and technically everyone can build one, therefore if bridge owner wants too much money for going over it you can build your owns.

Bad things happen when building a "bridge" becomes really easy and cheap then he realizes that everyone can build their own bridge, so he gets a patent for "bridge", so no one can build one and he can keep his profit. There is cases where such bridge was in fact something really smart and worth to be protected, then such patent does in fact protects his time and effort he put into inventing it.
However imagine a case that nobody ever before saw a river and needed a bridge, he was the first to come to a river and crossed it buy just dropping a tree over it - then he comes home and gets a patent for a "bridge" = everything put over a river to cross it. Invention is trivial, every thinking man would come up with this, but sine he now owns a patent for it noone else besides him can now build bridges EVER without buying his rights for over 9000.

Same happens in software market and it does slow down or even make impossible many things that might have come to this world without all this patent crap.

IP laws should be changed, but the reality is noone knows how to do this in a fair way, therefore we are stuck with this crap. Logic tells you every man shall be rewarded proportionally to the efforts they've put into creation, but while it is relatively easy to do calculate values of physical goods it is close to impossible to achieve the same with intellectual property, even worse when they come combined in one physical product.

Re: What is "piracy" and is it ever justified
 

Hardly, I'm simply not stating "they'd all go out of business and need to be quickly granted the right to copyright their recipes and sue the living daylights out of anyone who reproduces them."

People will still be creative, and those at the top of their game will still receive recognition. Significantly fewer would do so, but it would still be done.

I have stated elsewhere that I'd rather have copyrights and a deluge of crap than no copyrights and a trickle of crap. At least with the deluge the raw number of -good- works is higher. But obscenely strong and virtually perpetual copyright is ridiculous.

Re: What is "piracy" and is it ever justified
 

God damned it I just can't help responding at least to this one. Note that the long answer from someone else previously was quite good too and would deserve some answer as well. But it was also quite emotional, probably since this person is involved in software industry. So I prefer wait a bit, let some water flow under the bridge, in order not to get him even more angry. And this long post deserves a long answer.

Anyway, the very fact that street lamps are financed by taxes, and not by private sector and market forces, does prove my point. There must be a reason for this, and this is precisely because very early, society understood the very particular aspect of this object. Individuals realized that it is very difficult to monopolize the use of such tools, or to charge for their use. Same for roads or bridges, as already discussed. Therefore people decided that these kind of stuffs should be public property, and that everyone should put some money to finance it, without any consideration about who does actually use it.

In case of street lamps, it is not a matter of marginal cost, but rather of question of factorization of service. Factorization is to services what marginal costs is to goods. There is some kind of duality between both concepts, and both have pretty much the same applications regarding determination of price.

This is quite interesting considerations, as far as theoretical economics is concerned. But I confess this is a bit far away from software industry.

Re: What is "piracy" and is it ever justified
 

I'm already on the same page as you, Crash. The difference between your examples is, if say the "house" in question was a mobile home, and I took it, I've deprived the user of its use, and harm is done.

If I copy a program, and only do that. I just copy it. Is any harm done?

Let me rephrase that into a scenario.

Say I'm on an Apple computer and I download the latest Age of Empires video game (or any other windows-only program). Assume I'm running OSX, I don't have Boot Camp, so all I have is a useless copy of this program on my computer.

At this point though, what I've downloaded isn't really even a program. It doesn't run or do ANYTHING on my OSX computer. Its just a really long number. So have I done any harm or theft in this scenario? Ignore for the moment what my intent might be.

Now, say I was on a PC and I downloaded that program and then ran it and install it. All of you (and me included) would say you have committed piracy.

I'm just trying to separate the concept of copying a long number, and using functionality without paying.

In the case of a house, I cannot take the house from you without also depriving you of its functionality. In the case of code, I could "take" from you (copy) the program a billion times and not deprive you of your profits until the first time I ran your program and used it without paying.

Re: What is "piracy" and is it ever justified
 

What about Coca Cola and other soda companies? They're right out of business.

Re: What is "piracy" and is it ever justified
 

You bought up the topic - you KEEP bringing up topics which are as unrelated to the issue at hand as a frog is to a bicycle, when one is refuted you simply move on to the next piece of unrelated gibberish.

Crapping on about things and using words you obviously do not understand the meaning of doesn't make you look eloquent, it makes you look like an idiot.

Keep that in mind when compiling the next "But lets take a tree - what if someone patented trees" or whatever other insane leap of logic argument you put forward next.

PS: By azorni's logic the design for the above mentioned house could be copied for any other building. Since once it is drawn it no longer has any intrinsic value apparently.

Re: What is "piracy" and is it ever justified
 

mmurfin87 - Interesting idea but this is not how the law works. The 'long number' is what's copyrighted, so just by copying it without permission you've offended. I do agree with what you're saying though.

And to think we've now got 31 pages of generally high quality discussion all from someone's flippant comment about warez-ing the angry birds level pack!

Re: What is "piracy" and is it ever justified
 

Precisely.. the logic here actually has nothing at all to do with the Software industry.. or at least: the vast majority of it.

For example: You *could* use this type of logic to say that Bill Gates should be federally funded and that the US taxes are increased to pay for Microsoft.. since nearly everyone uses Microsoft Windows - it's become a critical piece of most businesses, it is therefore just as much a "widely" used and therefore should be "public property" and funded via public funds, not individuals. In fact.. I'll bet more people in the US use Microsoft more than any given road in the US. Even landmarks or tourist attractions.

Then Microsoft Windows would be legitimately "free" to the public ;).

However.. this logic does *not* apply to about 99% of the rest of the software industry, where the software itself is actually used in very specific, and by significantly less people.. meaning that they could not say that they need public funding because most people have never even heard of them - so how would they get money and/or funding to continue creating their software if they were required to give it free?

By pirating it... giving it away for free without royalty to the owners.. takes away their only source of income and the software will cease to be maintained or updated because the programmers were fired since the company couldn't afford to keep them.

People can say and claim Programs are simply 1's and 0's all day long, and say that because it's all broken down into 1 long number anyway then it's value is useless... this is completely irrelevant. How many people can or could have built that same big long number? How many did? If the answer is many.. why are you pirating his software? Find a free one. If the answer is one - then big long number or not, what that programmer has is something akin to Brain Surgery. You wouldn't demand that the best specialist in Brain surgery be forced to work on you for free would you? Same for the programmer. They've built something that is obviously popular enough to be pirated, useful enough for you to want, and is the only person(/people) to have done it.

They should get compensation for that.

Now.. how they get compensation, and how they *should* release their software, and other ideals like that are for the other thread that doesn't exist that Fargus keeps trying to get people to start. But for this thread: Suffice to say, the programmer was the only that did it - and he chose to require you to pay for it to receive it, and to not do so is going against the wishes of the author.

Whether right, wrong, morale or not the only thing that *really* matters is, In the US (and I believe the UK?) - this is considered illegal. That's really the short and end of it. Philosophical discussions aside..

I personally believe Marijuana should be held to the same standard as alcohol as they are both pretty much equally harmful. So either ban both, or legalize both, but it makes no sense to split them. That doesn't mean I should go out smoking Pot or that I have a leg to stand on in court if I do.

Re: What is "piracy" and is it ever justified
 

I never said that piracy isn't piracy. I said, as others did, that piracy is not theft. I said for instance that according to me, piracy is illegal gift. I never said commercial software is inherently worthless. What I said is that its value is difficult to convert into price. Value and price are two very different things. Value is not necessary commercial value. I've given many examples.

I am not convinced by those reasons, that's all. Now, law is law, so I will conform to it. But I have the right to say what I think about it, and to vote against it if I can.

I very much doubt that if software industry was to vanish, all these people will suddenly become jobless and miserable. I believe in Schumpeterian concept of creative destruction, so I don't think it would be a problem for them.

Well, in my all life, I've crossed many bridges, and I have never ever paid.

This seems unfair. Many times I've given other examples, and developed different aspects of the pb. Copy vs counterfeiting, price vs value, intellectual ownership vs intellectual paternity, costs of production vs costs of diffusion, price elaboration mechanisms, and so on...

I don't get your point here.

I did not say that the value of a product was the sum of the value of its component. I don't know where you've read that.

Again, you mix up value and price. A code may have a lot of value, and indeed much more than the sum of its lines. But just as poem is more valuable than its words or a theorem more valuable than the axioms. But when I use Pythagoras theorem, or when I think about "la cigale et la fourmi", I don't have to worry about whom I will have to pay license fees to.

Yeah indeed that's a lot of people. And all of them work in order to fit in the software retail industry paradigm. But once you question the very existence of this paradigm, everything change.

I've already said that making profits is absolutely not the pb. I'm liberal and I have no objections about people making money, as long as they do that with market forces, and not thanks to the intervention of law.

Production costs are not everything. That's the all point of my intervention.


Being without a job doesn't have to be permanent. Those people won't lose their arms or their brain. They still are the same person and can find an other job. This is Schumpeter again.

I'll read these links, this seems interesting. Thanks.

Re: What is "piracy" and is it ever justified
 

15 million Americans might disagree with that statement.