Rob wrote:
>On Tue February 21 2006 15:08, Peter Bessman wrote:
>
>
>>The fact that it's illegal to sell your vote does not prove
>>that contracts can be morally wrong.
>>
>>
>
>Not that the 'shrink-wrap licenses' to which Fons was referring
>are even accepted as contracts in many venues. I certainly
>never had a contract with, say, Syntrillian in the bad old days
>when I would download a pirated copy of Cool Edit Pro; the text
>of whatever EULA they used was never even included with the
>illicit version. The GPL itself is also not a contract; it's a
>license without which you can't distribute the program except by
>violating copyright.
>
>The respect argument is specious as well; I certainly don't
>respect Wal-Mart when I'm buying a new toothbrush or whatever.
>(And since I've paid for it, I'm perfectly within my rights to
>share that toothbrush with anyone, though I'd probably rather
>not.)
>
>So we're back to copyright violation, not breach of contract.
>And I stand by my original statement. I kinda like copyright
>now that there's enough software covered under the GPL to make
>it inconvenient for the people who fought so hard to extend
>copyright to cover computer software in the first place.
>
>Nonetheless, those who have attempted to use copyright to turn
>imaginary property (based on infinite reproducibility) into real
>property (based on scarcity) are wrong, no matter how much it
>might benefit them to do so. One million copies of notepad.exe
>have the exact same value in the real world as a single copy,
>regardless of how much sweat some peon in Redmond shed during
>its initial development. And that goes for emacs, Finder, Doom
>3, Donkey Kong, In A Silent Way, Oliver Twist, Citizen Kane and
>the Mona Lisa too.
>
>I don't want to hear the "but no one can make any money unless we
>treat copies like physical objects" line anymore either. If I
>went into business selling a new kind of wrenches, with a
>shrink-wrap agreement on the outside requiring that they were
>only to be used by the purchaser, and then went broke because
>people started sharing their wrenches left and right despite my
>legal threats, I would deserve to be broke for pursuing such an
>unrealistic business plan. See also: CueCat.
>
>Rob
>
>
>
Amen.
c.
-- www.cesaremarilungo.comReceived on Sun Feb 26 20:18:23 2006
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