Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
This is sophistry, pure and simple. I have a right - both moral and legal - to expect payment from those who use my work, and those who use it without paying are taking money from me to which I am legally entitled. The law provides no practical mechanism for me to prosecute these people, and that is unjust. Copyright infringement laws, as they currently stand, provide no protection for the ordinary person, since only large companies can afford to take civil action against the offenders. I can't go to the police and say "Fred Bloggs is using my software without paying for it", even if he stands up and shouts from the rooftops that he's doing so. This is not justice, by any definition. If the law says to someone "you have these rights" then it should provide a mechanism to enforce those rights.
I'm not "money grabbing". I give away a lot of stuff for free (all the eBooks I upload to MR, for example), but I do eBooks for fun, and software for money. I don't think I'm being unreasonable in expecting to get paid for that software by people who choose to use it. I don't know how you make your living, but, whatever you do for a job, you probably expect to get paid for it. Current copyright law does not provide a practical method for creators of intellectual property to ensure that they do get paid for their work.
|
Harry, copyright law
cannot provide "a practical method for creators of intellectual property to ensure that they do get paid for their work". Current technology does not allow it. That fact may be immoral and unjust; that doesn't stop it from being the reality at this point in time. Technology giveth and technology taketh away...
I make my living as a mainframe programmer (see: Dinosaur). Right now I'm getting $46 USD an hour to do it. The work is specialized, I have no copyright, (by agreement) but nobody is going to steal it because it costs a million or so just to have the equipment to run the code. Just like the pre 1960 world of copyright. If I wrote code for $200 machines, easily transferable, lots of people would pirate it, (if it was any good). And there would be nothing economically effective I could do about it. That's today's reality. I won't ever be able to live on royalties, I've long since come to grips with that...(I use my excess profits to buy dividend paying stocks. Those are my royalties (sic))...