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Well, "might makes right" principle surely still sticks around. I just meant that I determine what is right for me, as Galileo did when he muttered 'and yet it moves'. What public face I keep to appease other primate animals is another matter.
Back to the subject, I don't want to write a 3-page post again, so I'll just summarize my viewpoint in short: ideas and knowledge can't be property, anything you can share and multiply as easily as Jesus shared fish and bread is a common property of intelligent beings (currently mankind), we add to it, each building on what ancestors built, modifying it, expanding. Every writer writes books with words invented by other people, ideas polished and spread through the ages, and very rarely his craft of putting those bits and pieces together produces something comparable in value to the value of bits themselves. For those rare gems I have appreciation, and I donate, and buy hardcovers. For those other thousands of books written every year, well, I'm quite satisfied with public domain instead. In both cases I don't consider book a property, and copyright anything sensible, and I believe copyright should be abandoned (or at least shortened to a few years, kept purely for utilitarian reason). I'm also fine with people who don't want to create without monetary compensation to do something else. I'm sure civilization won't die.
I wonder if you'll believe me that despite having no qualms about reading pirated books I haven't done so for years now, all my reading time consumed by public domain mysteries from XIX century from here and Munseys...
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