Nikhil;199353 Wrote: > Thats an extremely simplistic and incorrect way of thinking about it. If > I spend 10 years of my life developing a therapeutic molecule or drug, > only to have someone reverse engineer it, manufacture it, and make > money off it, while I received nothing (even if the original recipe is > still in my hands) - it most certainly is no different than stealing, > and should be treated as a crime. And similarly it is no different for > artists and their creations.
*Copyright infringment, or patent infringement, is not stealing*. Not legally, not morally, not logically - only on internet fora is it sometimes incorrectly equated with theft. Copyright is not ownership, it's the legal right to control the making of copies of a particular work. The only harm the copyright holder sustains in a violation is the loss of some potential future profit, which is very, very different from having a physical possesion stolen from you. That doesn't mean copyright infringement is right - just that the analogy to theft is simply the wrong one. What's at issue is how to maximze the benefit to the public good. If there were no copyright there would be little incentive to create art and invent things, but if there is too much (like an eternal term, or life of the author + 70 years) it doesn't create more of an incentive for profit, but only hurts the public by restricting access. Therefore (by the intermediate value theorem :-) ) there should be an ideal finite period for copyrights which maximized the public good. We should be arguing about what that term is, not making silly statements about how this is theft. -- opaqueice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=34928 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
