[LINK] In other news....

[Brendan Scott]

Stilgherrian wrote:
> On 25/6/07 1:32 PM, "Rick Welykochy" <rick at praxis.com.au> wrote:
>> Philosophically speaking, it is one thing to relieve another
>> person of their chattel at gunpoint. It is quite another to copy virtual
>> property without actually depriving anyone of anything using a keyboard.
> 
> While overall I agree that the crimes of theft and copyright infringement
> are in separate categories, the "without actually depriving anyone of
> anything using a keyboard" is a furphy.
>
> If you make a copy of someone's copyrighted material without paying, you're
> depriving them of whatever profit they would have made had you acquired that
> copy according to the license they want you to follow.

The difficulty with this argument is that it is not applied generally.  When you use a house some builder built years ago, no one expects you to pay a licence fee to the builder for that use.   The reason is property.  It would be possible in theory to create a system where builders never actually sell anything, just licence it, but this would undermine lots of things that make our economy work (imagine if everything which you currently "buy" was actually licensed, and every time you used it you needed to work out if your use was complying).   There are now job categories which fall under the heading of licensing compliance.  Some people claim to specialise in understanding Microsoft licensing.  What do these jobs contribute to the economy?   

The legislature has chosen to create a category of rights which apply post sale of a thing.  In doing so they are undermining the concept of property.