Quote:
Originally Posted by nekokami
I don't know about your apple replicator (it seems to me that the energy to produce the mass has to come from somewhere, so you're probably being charged for it, either that or everyone produces food this way already, and something other than material scarcity is driving the economy).
|
Well, right. But it's a thought experiment - a little scenario meant to isolate the philosophical principles behind people's stances. Like the
"Ring of Gyges". We've thought about Intellectual property as a special entity for so long, it might be worth considering the same scenario with 'conventional' property. Is it stealing to deprive the apple merchant of a sale he might otherwise have made?
Quote:
Originally Posted by nekokami
But I'm pretty sure there were criminal penalties in the US for distributing copyrighted material before 1997, whether for profit, for free, online, by sneakernet, or encrypted on stone tablets. The NET Act may have made this more explicit, but it really just reiterated existing copyright law, didn't it?
|
No, the courts decided that there was no explicit law allowing for punishment of non-commercial copyright infringement, and suggested that Congress might want to change that... (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NET_Act).
Prior to the Internet, it was difficult and expensive for copyright works to be duplicated and distributed, so people generally didn't do it for free, only for profit. So Congress apparently overlooked it while drafting the copyright laws. (Or there are other interpretations for its absence...)