Quote:
Originally Posted by carld
You can't tell me that you have a right to take what you want from someone else just because you don't want to pay for it.
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Ok Carld, let's take this from the top. Since you don't want to acknowledge the difference between physical theft and copyright infringement, we'll describe this in physical lease terms, which is closer to the reality.
The government granted you a exclusive lease on your work called a copyright. It is
not property, it's a
lease. It doesn't last forever. Like any lease, it
expires. At the time of the granting of the lease, you agreed to the terms and conditions,
that were in effect at that time. You didn't have to either place the work under those terms, or release it at all. You chose to do so under those terms.
Now if I leased a car from the government, at the terms of 4 years at no more that 60K miles (100K KM), do you have the right to suddenly say, "I'm going to use 120K miles , lowering the residual value, because I decided I wanted to drive more." Would you not be stealing miles/value from the lessor (the Government)?
Contrawise, If you sign an agreement for 4 years at 120K miles, and the government suddenly said, "I'm going to change it to 60K miles, because I want more residual value." Would not the Government be stealing miles/value from you?
And so to copyright. When the Government "extends" the terms of copyright,
at the behest of and to the economic benefit of the lessee, i.e. the copyright holders, is this not "stealing", by your own definition of Stealing? It's stealing from the people who granted the lease (through their government)
in the first place.
So to me, that makes each and every holder of an extended copyright a thief, just as you consider copyright infringers. They don't have to be thieves, they could quitclaim into the public domain the extended leases granted. But they don't. So they're thieves, by
your definition.
So, at the end of this long chain, why are you coming down so hard on one set of thieves (copyright infringers), and being so soft on the the other set of thieves (the holders of extended copyrights)? They're both thieves (by your definition.)