danieru: You are conflating 3 separate concepts: [1] the abstract concept of
a work, like “The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha”, [2] its
physical representation (an exemplar of this work as found in most libraries)
and [3] “work” as the action of making effort to build something (as in
“it took Cervantes work to write Don Quixote”). In the same confusion,
you are also conflating physical property with intellectual property. This is
exactly the confusion that information (software, music, movies and similar)
monopolies want people to make; they are spreading this confusion when they
speak of “piracy” and “stealing”. I have marked in this message
usages of these concepts to make it clear.
>So because you can easily make copies then the value of my work is 0?
I quote this as an example of the aforesaid conflation. Here onpon isn't
saying that your work [1] is worthless, but that a copy [3] of your work [1]
has almost zero monetary value since in the digital age it is extremely easy
to copy information when not encumbered by DRM.
The argument of onpon is that the owner of a copy [2] of a work [1] should be
able to use his copy according to his discretion; this includes making a
reproduction of this copy and selling it.
When you put work [3] into making a work [1] and then somebody distributes
copies [2] your work [1] without your authorization, they are not stealing or
selling your work [3] (that is the fallacy behind the term “piracy”). You
only have done as much work [3] as you wanted, and making copies of the
product of that work [3], that is it, the work [2] does not entails a cost
for you. You may be able to profit by first using law to make illegal for
people to make physical copies of that work [1], then act as the sole
provider of copies [2] for that work [1] and charge a fee, or sell the right
to make those copies [2] to third parties (to a publisher if it is a book).
However, it is a fallacy to conclude that somebody is stealing anything from
you by producing copies [2] of your work [1] by his own means (bypassing your
attempt to establish a monopoly), because he is not consuming anything from
you or forcing you to make more work [1] that what you have already did by
your own will.
A separate argument may be made on whether the artificial monopolies that
Copyright grants (and the implied restriction of our ability to make copies
of works without depending on the author) may be justified on the grounds
that it provides a means to found production of works [2] in a capitalist
economy. It is a mistake to think that Copyright exists or try to justify it
because it enable authors to profit; that is backwards reasoning. By a
similar reasoning we could try to “justify” an hypothetical law to forbid
people to prepare their own food so that restaurants will profit more,
because that way restaurants will profit more, then claim that allowing
people to prepare food is stealing from the restaurants.
