Re: [LAD] RAUL?

From: David Olofson <david@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Wed Nov 16 2011 - 14:59:43 EET

On Wednesday 16 November 2011, at 10.57.47, Louigi Verona
<louigi.verona@email-addr-hidden> wrote:
> Thanks for replying.
> Allow me to comment on a few things.
>
> "The concept of property just is artificial in general."
>
> All ideas and concepts are artificial in a way, however the concepts of
> property are based on an inescapable property of things
> to be scarce.
> [...]

I don't know about other people here, but I've only got 24 hours a day, some
of which are lost to sleep and other activities, and I've most likely got only
a few decades left to live. Time is a very scarce resource indeed.

Unfortunately, I've "wasted" most of my life so far on programming, music and
various other things that are hard enough to make a living off of regardless
of laws and other tools. Selling anything is really just "suggesting" that
people pay for it, as only a few percent of the consumers will anyway.

That part is not really a problem, though! The *actual* market is only those
few percent anyway, the rest concisting mostly of people that would just not
bother if they couldn't get it for free. More importantly, that last group
gives you free distribution and marketing!

So, from that point of view, copyright law is pretty much useless anyway. It's
fighting a hopeless battle against the very nature of these things, and trying
to enforce it is anything from pointless through devastatingly
counterproductive. So, it could definitely be argued that copyright law is
irrelevant in this context.

However, if just any business was legally allowed take anyone's "intellectual
property" and make money off of it, paying no royalties or anything, that
would be a problem. How would one prevent that without copyright law or
similar tools? Never releasing any source code? Never releasing anything at
all? (No significant difference in this context. Comments are mostly garbage
anyway, and machine code is just another language.)

As to motivation, well sure, there will always be people doing all sorts of
stuff just for fun, self-education etc - or because they just need it to get
some job done.

Unfortunately, in the case of music, video games and various other things, the
interesting part of making a polished, thoroughly enjoyable and/or useful
product is generally only some 10% of the work. The rest is just hard, boring,
frustrating work that will rarely ever get done without some other motivation
than the work itself. It's not the kind of work that attracts contributors to
a Free/Open Source project either, in cases where that is even applicable.

One could argue that "entertainment products" aren't really necessary anyway,
so it wouldn't matter if people stopped making them. By that logic however, if
you don't need the products, you don't need to pay for them either, so where's
the problem...?

(Personally, I'll never rely on a proprietary, closed source engine or
development tool ever again if I can help it, but that's a different situation
altogether.)

-- 
//David Olofson - Consultant, Developer, Artist, Open Source Advocate
.--- Games, examples, libraries, scripting, sound, music, graphics ---.
|   http://consulting.olofson.net          http://olofsonarcade.com   |
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Received on Wed Nov 16 16:15:02 2011

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