[llreader]

To continue: The problem with copyright and violations thereof is that they are not subject to an absolute morality. Copyright (like most morality, but let's not get sidetracked) is a social contract entered into by several parties with fairly clear goals and responsibilities apportioned to the various actors. The government seeks to increase creative works, and thus sets aside a protected period for intellectual property, and legally defends this new right. The public accepts the loss of what was once their right to take ideas freely from the public domain in exchange for two things: 1) an overall growth in intellectual property brought about by the legal rights of these new intellectual property owners to exploit said property and 2) the knowledge that their property will be returned to them in a reasonable period of time (initially 14-28 years). This is a great system, because not only does it do what was intended, it automatically apportions value to intellectual property that market activity deems as having social value, rather than some sort of centralized distribution of support for creative thinkers (which also exists).

The problem is that one of the parties, the intellectual property owners (who increasingly are not the creative thinkers) have decided that they do not want to uphold their end of the agreement and have used the immense wealth created by intellectual property in recent decades to influence public policy, essentially violating this social contract. There was a deal. It has been broken.

I know people are going to pirate my book. It makes me sad, but I understand it completely. In the absence of justice, people take the law into their own hands. I understand that this is larger than me or my personal stake in this.