Quote:
Originally Posted by HansTWN
Authors in general are a wealthy minority? Employees working for publishers are? The " "right' to just take what you want without consent from the owner" has been taken away from the majority. And so it should be.
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The entire concept of "intellectual property" is still a fairly new thing, and it is not undisputed. One could make a case that it is uncivilized to withhold knowledge, e.g. textbooks, from those who cannot afford to pay for it. Numerous textbooks are not available in libraries.
Similarly, copyright is not undisputed, either, and the Swiss law makers have a different take on it. Why does that make them anything other than civilized? They looked at studies, too, and found that the industry's claims are exaggerated and unjustified. I prefer that approach over those laws that are the result of massive lobbying.
DRM and copyrights don't just take away the right to distribute something (I can go along with that, though I disagree with the length of copyrights.), but also the right to re-sell what you paid for and to duplicate for personal use (it's illegal in most EU countries and the US to circumvent the DRM). Amazon's refund policy is voluntary, it's not a right. In my country, you have no right to return a digital product.
"So it should be" is an opinion, not a fact. In Switzerland, it isn't that way, and the Swiss law makers felt that
that is how it should be. Personally, I would agree that it is too much freedom and doesn't sufficiently address the needs of the content creators, but if I had to decide between too much freedom and too little freedom, I'd always opt for the former.