Quote:
Originally Posted by nekokami
In your mind, is it morally necessary to compensate someone for their labor when you take advantage of that labor, assuming they have not voluntarily donated that labor to you?
In other words, we're not discussing forcing someone to compensate the laborer for arbitrary labor, we're talking about whether someone who enjoys the fruits of someone else's labor has a moral obligation to compensate the laborer -- in some form.
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I do not go that with abstract questions because the real world has a habit of throwing up too many twists and turns. However in this case the answer is a resounding
NO because we as a society by definition depend on lots of stuff done by the others.
For example when we use computers, we can start with the inventor of the transistor that allowed computers to appear, or with the guys who shaped quantum mechanics that allowed transistors to appear, or with the guys that did calculus that allowed qm to appear, just on the theoretical side of things. A long list to compensate...
I understand where the question comes from and I do not want to be facetious, but to me all these abstract questions are mostly exercises in "how many angels fit on the head of the pin". I'd rather discuss concrete situations, concrete responses of real people (as for example the article I pointed in the beginning of the thread referred to - the fact that lots of people, with percentage increasing inverse with age have a given response to some questions and what it pertains for the future of publishing, music...)
And about my views on the original article: I do not believe the sky will fall as implied there, I think there will be enough paying customers to support music, books, movies, and the pie will increase but will be distributed differently with more and more power switching to the authors/creators. When kids will have more disposable income they will pay for more content, but they may also download more content for free and so what. This happened always (substitute for download - use the library, book clubs, read in bookstores) and the pie kept increasing due to increased prosperity, increased number of people and so on...
No reason to expect any of these to change.