Re: Theres a time and place?
Posted by bakert on 12-19-2007 in What are your thoughts on filesharing and piracy?"Theft" is the incorrect word to use regarding "intellectual property" (which is itself a highly dubious term). More accurate words are: copying, sharing, copyright infringement. If I steal your car, you have no car. If I infringe your copyright you still have the film/music/software/whatever. You may not approve of either but you really shouldn't equate the two.
Your argument regarding financial incentive is provably false for music. 99% of all musicians have received little or no financial rewards from record labels. They are still going. QED.
For software it is more interesting. My suspicion is that the value of source code being available is so great that it outweighs any anti-capitalist disincentive. Less effort but less wasted effort? In fact, many many multi-million and multi-billion dollar businesses are based both directly and indirectly on open source software. Think how much money GNU/Linux has saved Google. If they then contribute 1% of that to Linux, Linux gets better. Then someone else will use it, and save money, and fund small improvements that they require. This seems to be working pretty well so far. (See recent figures for Linux on the server, Linux on the desktop, Linux on embedded devices, etc.) I'm looking at what's best for society rather than any one individual. If you are bright enough to be a professional programmer you will find a place that pays your way.
In response to: Theres a time and place?
Honestly, commerce is the most potent driving force that stimulates innovation and the fruition of ideas. If someone feels that he or she can really make some kind of return on a certain thing (really it can be anything--software, music, video, a device, hell even just an idea), he already has major incentive to invest in it. Software companies buy brilliant minds to add features to their products and make more money. Prescription drug companies buy fresh graduates who know their stuff and cure more diseases. Cash flow begets idea flow and the cycle is perfect. The copycats out there are the ones who are breaking the cycle. Individuals who would otherwise be customers are downright stealing from the major producers and in some cases, turning a profit off their output (that is, a profit that is translated to a loss to the company). While to some, this is seen as simply as taking a few dollars away from the corporate fat cats who can't tell the difference, the real impact is felt among the workers, the peons. Programmers and researchers and every other day-in-day-out cruncher under the sun will suddenly find themselves out of jobs or find pay cuts in their checks. As much as Id like to believe that all people are truly dedicated to their craft, I know a lot better, in that most of them just want to be able to bring home dinner every night. So this is where I see piracy and the theft of intellectual property as a problem.
However, where I see this notion becoming a real quandary is through companies or individuals who have a stronghold on the market they compete in. Companies who try to monopolize their sector by buying out competition or by stopping end-user-driven or even end-user-requested customization or feature packing are really driving themselves in a hole with piracy. If a company practices in such a manner that doesnt foster to any real innovative growth or saturates the field with their own proprietary terms (i.e. microsoft and noncompliance to wc3) then I feel like they could be hit with an "equal inequity" that wouldn't exactly be considered kosher in most legal channels.
I guess one area that is sort of the odd-ball out in all of this is the open source community. It doesn't exactly cohere with most generic commercialization models that are out there, yet a lot of the ones we are familiar with (Eclipse foundation, Mozilla foundation) manage to stay alive financially. If someone could shed some light on how that works exactly, that would be fantastic... ebee