Right there you are the pre-digital constraints… It is taking

if anything it seems like you’re the one accepting the constraints of the pre-digital world and trying to force them onto the digital one… they’re different worlds, they have different constraints and therefore require different rules of conduct…

“When I see software, I see a product… plain and simple… and taking a product is theft…”

copying != taking… at least not in any meaningful sense of either word…

You’re accepting constraints from a pre-digital world… constraints that needed to be adjusted and re-evaluated when we entered the digital age but weren’t. When I see software, I see a product… plain and simple… and taking a product is theft…

As for computers replicating software, of course they can… I never said they couldn’t… I said people can’t replicate it… I don’t mean copy and paste.. I mean go and make your own copy of it.. write the code yourself.

sorry, i’m a software developer by profession and even *I* don’t see software as a car, nor do i care to be told by society to start thinking that way…

the only reasonable way i can see to think of software as a car is if you invoke a fictional world where matter replicators are plentiful, and then ask ourselves what society would think about the practice of replicating cars…

until such time as the same physical rules apply to both the physical and digital worlds, comparing items from each is absurd…

“Software is a tangible product… ”

software is not a tangible product by definition… software is called software, rather than hardware, precisely because it is NOT a physical object… only physical objects can be tangible…

“the majority of the population cannot look at software and replicate it…”

the majority of computers replicate software simply by installing it… they do it again when they run it… and once more when swapping it out of physical memory in order to execute something else… computers as we know them would not be able to operate without the ability to replicate software…

I don’t see software as a paint job… I see software as the car…I believe we need to redefine it so that society sees it as the car.. Software is a tangible product… The majority of the population can look at a paint job and replicate it… the majority of the population cannot look at software and replicate it…

This is the problem I have, in the grand scheme of things… Developing software is no different than say building a new car…. However it is quite different from a paint job. Law makers need to wake up and realize this, accept it, and enforce it.

And if I hear one more person say,”If only they charged less”… No one says that about a $500,000.00 car and then goes and takes one… Software is a product… taking a product without paying for it is theft… I could care less about the IP argument that people want to make so that they can sleep better at night… it’s BS.

Would I still sleep at night? Of course, and so would he.

HA riiight
access to anyones Name, phone number and address is already available. Seperate, authorized credentials for financial access have never been “public knowledge”. Any organized study for the greater good of all kind is though – The Ethical Law.
I “could” send mine, as along as we had a completely honest, non-malicous exchange of both personal data’s. Are you ready to go to those trusting lengths ? Thats about the equivilant that most publishers feel. That they could release their products for free, but would never see the return – yes if based on todays purchasing system.
The entire ‘purchase’ process though is being reevaluated from single, personal purchasing, to mass-abundant licencing. I’ll let the lawyers take it from there ….

Roll on Kanada

the pirates AND the US supreme court… theft deprives the previous owner of the item stolen and the opportunity to subsequently use and/or sell it – no such thing happens with copyright infringement because the infringer has simply made a copy… one could argue that the infringement deprives the owner of the opportunity to sell to the infringer but that falls into the lost-sale fallacy where one assumes that the infringer would have paid for it if s/he had been unable to infringe…

of course, then there’s whole question of calling them pirates in the first place, since piracy was a crime all it’s own and generally involved boats…

i don’t think i’ll engage further about the rights and wrongs of copyright infringement, however, seeing as we both live in a country that officially recognizes some forms of it as protected under the law (re: private copying)…

on the flip-side
@bakez
“Knowledge IS supposed to be free.”

fine, i’d like to know you’re credit card number, name, phone number and address so why don’t you shoot it on over here for me, would you? i should be free to know those things after all, right?