> People are entitled to sell their work for the price that they can get for it,
Yes, but being entitled to get the protection of the police to enforce an impossible-to-enfore monopoly is another story.
The idea that you can publish copies of your music in the nature and expect people not to duplicate it is artificial. Besides, what's the reasonable cost the collectivity is willing to pay to enforce it? What if we charged the price of investigating and punishing pirates to the people whose content is protected?
There's a lot of innovation (both technologies and business models) to come from a world where copy is not punished by law, as seen in the other comments of this thread.
Heck, how did the software industry managed the ability to copy software? Is the BSA our unique tool? No. We created SAAS. Some companies sell one-year upgrades. Some do better: They sell happiness, beer and knowledge, and binaries are a side-effect. Patrick McKenzie insists enough: "The customer doesn't want your software, they want the built-in knowledge."
Criminilazing piracy is the worst thing for innovation.
> Yes, but being entitled to get the protection of the police to enforce an impossible-to-enfore monopoly is another story.
Sure, but copyright isn't impossible to enforce. I agree it's futile to try and enforce it aggressively at the level of individuals, but I'd guess that copyright owners accrue most of the benefit of copyright so long as it is enforced against large organizations. And I also agree that we shouldn't require society to take on a disproportionate share of the cost of policing copyright.
> No. We created SAAS. Some companies sell one-year upgrades.
I think the decline of "pay per copy" in the software industry has been for the negative. I'd rather pay for a copy of MS Office than use some crappy web-based equivalent, or worse some advertising-based equivalent.
Agreed — and, budget permitting, I do generally buy upgrades to software I use on a regular basis. What I'd like to see is more companies (1) offering maintenance plans that include perpetually licensed upgrades and/or (2) adopting Apple's model for products like Logic and Final Cut (minus the "hardware discount", of course), namely, reducing or eliminating upgrade/educational/volume discounts and unbundling ancillary tools in exchange for significantly reduced single unit retail pricing.
Yes, but being entitled to get the protection of the police to enforce an impossible-to-enfore monopoly is another story.
The idea that you can publish copies of your music in the nature and expect people not to duplicate it is artificial. Besides, what's the reasonable cost the collectivity is willing to pay to enforce it? What if we charged the price of investigating and punishing pirates to the people whose content is protected?
There's a lot of innovation (both technologies and business models) to come from a world where copy is not punished by law, as seen in the other comments of this thread.
Heck, how did the software industry managed the ability to copy software? Is the BSA our unique tool? No. We created SAAS. Some companies sell one-year upgrades. Some do better: They sell happiness, beer and knowledge, and binaries are a side-effect. Patrick McKenzie insists enough: "The customer doesn't want your software, they want the built-in knowledge."
Criminilazing piracy is the worst thing for innovation.