Originally Posted by raymor

Patent law especially and copyright coulda use some tweaking. The people who are radically against protecting the livelihoods of people who create content don't arm to be thinking things through, though. We couldn't spend all this time doing R&D if people were allowed to just steal copies of Strongbox and Throttlebox. In order to eat, we have to sell software, and that means copyright protection. Our systems would therefore not exist without some sort of copyright protection, because we couldn't spend our time and money creating something we couldn't sell.

If you spend your day building a table, after investing your money in the tools you need to build tables and investing your time into learning how to build tables, the table you build is yours, right? Why would anyone think that digital goods are any different than wooden goods?

The odd thing is, those who rail against music copyright don't seem to download any of the millions of songs that have been freely released by the artists. I do lighting for a band who has all of their music freely downloadable from their web site. How many people listen to it? Essentially none, because professionally produced music recorded and mixed in a $2 million studio sounds a lot better. These pirates COULD legitimately download the free stuff, but they don't. They want the best professional stuff produced with the most expensive gear, but they are indignant about paying 99¢ as their share of the cost. They think you and I should pay their share, it seems. Odd. Very odd thinking.