> I didn't say that this right should ever be traded for some greater > good. I just said it was a fundamental right.
I still can't see any evidence to sustain such a claim. > I could give a rat's ass what your intention is. I am telling you > that I have a right to copy. It is a moral belief, and it is not > really subject to this sort of debate. ... > Are you competing with anyone? Is the company you work for competing > with anyone? If you create a product that is cheaper and better than > someone else's product, and that other person goes out of business > because he cannot sell his product as a result of your creation and > marketing of your product, then by your logic, you are doing something > immoral. That is plainly ridiculous. Following your train of thought, I should not make my product, or I should do it worse or more expensive to be "fair" to those in the market?. In that case, we can apply your ideasand say that Mozilla has to stop making Firefox because it is already better than IE, and that is unfair to M$. Same arguments that held in the Netscape vs M$ trial. I think that competition is exactly what benefits the end-user, because they can get better and cheaper. I think OSS plays the same role in the market and, because it is free of charge, it lowers prices even further. Saying that people should not make better and cheaper products is retrograde. > I could give a rat's ass about your economic construct. I am telling > you that I have a right to copy. You need to be making an effective > argument as to why I should relinquish that right for the good of the > economy. Well, copy my stuff without my consent and I'll send you and your "right to copy" to jail. > It's not about economic freedom. It's about personal freedom. You do > not have a fundamental right to make a buck. You do have a > fundamental right to try to get others to willingly give you a buck in > exchange for something. You do not have a fundamental right to ask > the government to force someone else to give you a buck for some > arbitrary reason. If you expect others to willingly do that, you need > to give a rational argument about how the economy will be better off > for it. You can expect the government to *spend* someone else's > freedom for some greater good. But you have to realize that this is > exactly what you are doing when you advocated copyright -- spending > other peoples' freedom. Still, nobody has ever in the whole history of the world put a semi-decent reason of why copyright take away someone's freedom. If you get a product, you KNEW before getting involved in the transaccion what the terms were. It is as ridiculous as saying that because I got a loan from Wells Fargo to buy a house, now my freedom has been taken away because they will "have the government hold a gun to my head and force me to pay Wells Fargo his money back". If you knew it before hand it is not way restrictive. I won't say that BYU is restricting my freedom by forcing me to take GEs. I knew it before I registered. Making a zillion copies of artwork without compensating the person that worked his butt to make it DOES spend his freedom to enterpreneurship. Geez. > People have a right to try to persuade others to give them something > in exchange for something else. They do not have a right to constrain > a person's behavior in the privacy of his own home. Then don't buy the product. Easy. > Now you're twisting and sugar-coating the issue. You are using the > government to put a bubble around a business model by coercion of > behavior. OK, then I guess people should be allowed to take the baker's bread without paying because if not the government would be putting a bubble around him. > Enforcing copyright in the modern technological age can also be viewed > as shoehorning obsolete laws into unnatural models. Now information > is much more dynamic, and it has application outside of its > instantiated forms. You cannot blindly project the principles of > property laws into such a paradigm. Well, so because technology changed, morals change too? So, because there are p2p or torrent networks, my right to sell software the way I like it is gone? > Then you are a hypocrite, because you just got done explaining how a > derivator should have a government-granted monopoly over the privilege > to make and distribute copies of information. Monopoly about one product? Try monopoly over a whole market. If I make a database server package, well, I don't have a monopoly over the database server industry. Also I don't go personal calling people hypocrites in a holier-than-thou attitude. > This is a religious issue. ``Intellectual property'' is all about > belief. Do you *believe* that information is equivalent to physical > property? If so, you will attempt to regulate its use in accordance > with how physical property is regulated. Well, I don't think that tuxracer will save your soul, will it? > I thought I pointed out how Microsoft or RMS are both using copyright > principles to further their own agendas. Well, as long as they stay away from controlling the whole market, whatever. "Big company" isn't necessarily bad, neither "basement code-monkey" (like myself) doesn't mean good. That is both a Whig concept (the "court" and the "country") and a Communist concept (the "burgousy" and the "proletariat") First, no need to get personal. I don't like what you are saying, I think you assume too much and make no sense. You might think the same about me. But there is no need to use strong language or personal attack, unless your priorities are really messed up. Chris Alvarez -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
