On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 7:02 PM, Raj Mathur <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tuesday 08 Sep 2009, Vickram Crishna wrote: > > [snip] > > As such, it is a topic that needs to be discussed, thrashed out, and > > taken to action, within this forum. > > By copying someone's work you are not depriving that person of the ability > to use the work him/herself, only of projected income. IMO there's no > reason why copyright violation should be treated as theft as opposed to, > e.g., breach of contract with corresponding civil recourses. > Slightly oblique, but writer William Boyd, mentions in his book 'Bamboo' (a collection of his articles mainly first published in newspapers) that he had an awful time collecting the royalty dues on his books, particularly his first best seller, which led him into legal proceedings that eventually lasted some dozen years or more. I don't think this is a particularly isolated instance, as royalty shortchanging is allegedly a feature of the book publishing business (it has also deviled column syndication in India as a revenue source for independent writers, although I must admit there are also some decent syndicate agents). Whenever I read about 'software piracy' numbers in the seven and eight digits, I have to rofl (figuratively) given that it exclusively refers to imaginary lost sales, for software and applications that are largely popular due to their (suspicious, under the circumstances, although the perpetrators used to think of them as auspicious) ease of duplication. One never reads about the 'future sales' lost to the many small scale programmers who discovered how to build the features we today take for granted in say, an OS, but which curiously evolved into part of a popular proprietary OS as a competitive alternative (bundled for free, of course, never mind the unfriendly and restrictive trade practices *that* represents). I refer to numerous little fixes, such as for instance, defragmenting disk formats that weren't inherently fragment-proofed by design. There are many better examples, probably, that I can't myself immediately detail, but that I noticed in the 80s and 90s. Thinking about these things, I wonder whether, instead, some amount of genuine criminal enforcement ought not to be the norm, rather than the exception, or switching over to the civil recourses recommended above, that today apply only to those who cannot afford to ply the expensive and endless round of courts. > Regards, > > -- Raj > -- > Raj Mathur [email protected] http://kandalaya.org/ > GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F > PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves > > _______________________________________________ > network mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in > -- Vickram http://communicall.wordpress.com
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