Possibilities for commercial software?

[Richi Plana]

On Fri, 2007-01-26 at 10:58 -0600, Jonathon Suggs wrote:Dave Crossland
wrote:
> But when I copy software, no one loses it and another person gets it.
> There's no ethical problem.
> 
> Sorry Dave, but you are wrong.  There IS an ethical problem.  Just
> because you CAN do something doesn't mean that you should.

I don't think that that's Dave's argument. It's not doing something
because you can that you should. (I can steal a bottle of Coke, but I
shouldn't.) I think what he's trying to say is that you're not taking
anything from a person that lessens what he originally had.

With physical items, this is easier to comprehend: steal his car and he
has one less car to use. Things like music, software and ideas aren't as
tangible, but they can still contribute to a loss. It's kinda tricky,
though.

Let's say you never had intentions of buying a piece of music. In that
case, you would never be a sale. So if you downloaded that piece of
music, it wouldn't be lost revenue. But if you gave it away to others
who might have been potential buyers, that's lost revenue.

Ideas. Stealing ideas for profit (or to take someone's profit away) is
the whole concept behind patents.

Software is just an idea turned into code. There's tangible and
measurable work done there. Perhaps in this case it isn't that somebody
is losing something but that their work is taken advantage of for free.

Grey areas.
--

Richi