On Tuesday 17 July 2007, tedd wrote: > At 7:57 PM -0500 7/16/07, Larry Garfield wrote: > >I am not going to defend copyright infringement, but theft is depriving > >someone of something they used to have and no longer have. > > Time. > > An author spends his time writing a book, he should be paid for it. > > Time. > > You spend time coding, and you should be paid for it. Once I have written code or words, the time I have spent on that is gone. I will never get that time back, regardless of whether or not I get paid for it after the fact. Copyright is a system intended to increase the likelihood that I will make a financial return on that investment of time, but it is not a guarantee nor is it a time machine. *There is no right to profit.* There is only the artificial and government-created monopoly on duplication, intended to allow authors and creators to *try and profit* from their work. > Anyone who takes your work product without compensating you for your > TIME is stealing, period! No, they are committing copyright infringement. If they stoke the CD I had the manuscript on, then they would be stealing; they'd be stealing a CD. Please, it only cheapens the work to pretend it's something it's not. > And who is to say how much it is worth and how much you should be > paid? Should you make millions like the author of Harry Potter or > nothing like a significant percentage of authors do? You want to pay > everyone minimum wage, or is there a scale somewhere that would > suffice, I think not. Do not put words in my mouth. I never said anything about how much a person should be paid for a copyrighted work. I said, and the only thing I've said, is that copyright is not innate but a completely artificial monopoly, and infringing on that completely artificial monopoly is copyright infringement, which is not theft. > One of the reason why authors publish (books, software, music, > whatever) is that they may make a considerable amount of money from > their efforts -- AND -- what wrong with that? That helps drive > creativity and innovation and raises the quality of life for > everyone. You want to defend taking that away? Once again, please DO NOT put words in my mouth. I said outright that I am not supporting copyright infringement. I also do not support misrepresenting the law, the facts, or the Constitution. > Larry, I like your post and consider what you have to say seriously, > but you're slant on this is just plain wrong. I think you are completely misreading what that slant is, based on what you're claiming I said when I did not. -- Larry Garfield AIM: LOLG42 larry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ICQ: 6817012 "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it." -- Thomas Jefferson -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
