What. What about (amongst many other things) the indefinite copyright from the Copyright Term Extension Act? Sure, everything's fine from the point of view of megacorporations. Is everything fine from the point of view of the society at large? And don't go saying that because that sort of resembles the free market, it means it is great for society because I, for one, do not subscribe to that lie.

You say this:

And I retort that it doesn't matter what I buy. I am in a minority. I (and all members of my minority) can boycott every piece of bad (from my point of view) software and hardware in existence and it won't make any difference at all in the overall makeup of the market. Free market is like a pure democracy in this respect: tyranny of the majority over the minority.

I love this last bit. Every time I (and others) complain about M$, I am told that I am not an average user, and therefore my comments don't matter. This is the reality.

I don't believe that it hurts anyone (see above minority irrelevance argument), but because you (and others) believe that, my current explanation for my piracy is that I want the manufacturers of things I pirate to fail and go out of business. Awhile ago I (and thousands of others) seeded some StarCraft 2, and I'm happy to report that that made the game fail to thrive and the company to go under.

I believe that supporting piracy only helps the companies you pirate from.

True boycott means you refuse to even mention their products in any circumstance. If you're really good at it, you'll even forget their product exists.

If you're a true mastermind, you'll develop your own competitive product and still not remember where you got your inspiration from.

Those two things are not that separable. Why should copyright be temporary? The reasons I've seen for temporary copyright is that cultural growth is fueled by sharing: copyright length is set that the original creator is rewarded, but the cultural growth is not stifled unduly. From the point of view of the user (consumer in the more general sense) any non-zero length of copyright, and thus the very idea of copyright, is detrimental.

"If the problem didn't exist, then you wouldn't have a problem." Don't just assume away my very assumptions and use that as the argument. The assumption is that I am in a minority small enough that no matter what we do, the change in our spending will be lost in the noise of the profit fluctuations of a company, making it unable (even in principle) to satisfy our needs.

That is true, but this value is negligible for digital copies of software. Maybe it hurts others, but they certainly don't notice it.

E.g. I might pirate something in complete secret, and never brag about it to anyone... I might use this thing in complete secrecy: nobody would ever know whether or not I had it without paying for it except me. I wouldn't even change my shopping habits to reflect that I now have this thing. I might even buy it legitimately, to screw the system. Have I hurt anyone?

What if I do start bragging about it? Perhaps it'll serve as an advertisement. What if I start using it publically (e.g. use the thing's file format). Perhaps that'll entrench the company's market. Have I hurt anyone? Perhaps I even helped them more than I hurt. It is not at all apparent which way that equation leads.

I for one hope it hurts them more, the bastards.

Opinions change from time to time given new evidence, as do reasons for doing things. The only opinions that don't change, are those of idiots.

If there was no copyright, the only creations would come from individuals who would be willing to work for free. Businesses that rely on copyright would cease to exist, along with the innovations they bring.

You should accept the situation, because that's how democracy works. Suppose you wanted to go out completely naked; most people wouldn't accept that. Yes, you will be forced to be dressed, but the majority of the people want that, and you should accept that.

No, it's not negligible. Suppose you write a very nice video game and you publish it without any form of protection. Then no one buys it, instead they all pirate it. You can't say this value is negligible, is it? you would have expenses that you couldn't pay because no one bought your game.

It's not a matter of doing piracy publicly or not. From the moment you enjoy something, you give value to something. This value is not rewarded to the people that created the product you enjoy.

True.

Not true.

It's not. It takes a lot of energy to run a computer.

Agreed. The copying cost is not important any more. But there is still the issue of compensating the creators for their work.

Can you provide a way to secure that the original creators will be compensated for their work, and also make software free and that their competitors will not steal their ideas?

Personally, I cannot find such a way. It's either copyright or copyleft. There is no middle ground: if you let the source code out there, pretty soon it will fall in the hands of your competitors.

I think that closed source software isn't really a problem. If there is something that is closed source, you can write an open source software that does the same thing. The only drawback is that it takes effort to do what essentially others have also did - but it's a tradeoff I can live with, because competition promotes innovation.

I pity the fool who has to labor only to get money.

It goes well beyond that, lots of people have quit buying otherwise valuable games and programs because of DRM.

http://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/603194/854393#target

I never said otherwise. That's why I said "rethink", not "abolish".

Apart from the fact that ideas cannot be stolen (the closest thing would be using someone else's idea and claiming that it was yours); yes, there are a few ways I can think of.

First of all, if we stop thinking of ideas as 'things' you can 'own', competitors stealing ideas will be a non-issue; the new issue, then, is how do we compensate people who come up with ideas for their efforts? A few ideas (none of which are mine, BTW), have been around for quite a while:

• society funding (read: tax money)

• donations and goodwill

• outright communism / socialism (the real kind, not the dictatorship-in-embarrassing-disguise kind we've had in recent history)

I'm not too confident in either, but then, I'd like any of these better than the current solution.

Why not? Reality is proving you wrong. Numerous software packages are dual-licensed or use some other kind of hybrid model halfway between open-source and closed-source; the custom-built software world uses all sorts of copyright constructs anywhere between "vendor retains all rights" and full copyright transfer; larger systems are often built from both open-source and closed-source commercial components. Mixed open-source / closed-source systems are the pragmatic norm.

Also, open-source licenses have been shown to hold up in court; just because you release source code doesn't mean you lose all power over it. Microsoft has released parts of the .NET framework's source code, yet if you use it to build anything meaningful, expect a bunch of bloodthirsty lawyers on your tail.

It's not the only drawback. You can't source-code-audit closed-source software; you can't learn from it to produce even better code; you can't port it to a binary-incompatible platform; when encountering a bug, you cannot analyse it to either find a reliable workaround or develop a fix; you cannot easily reuse parts to assemble them into something new; coding style and the general state of a codebase can tell a lot about the overall quality and reliability of a piece of software.

Competition often fuels innovation, but it can also kill innovation: in the free market sense, competition stimulates profitability, not usefulness per se.

And don't forget that there is an enormous amount of competition in the FOSS world. People aren't competing for money, but they are competing for an audience, because without one, it's almost impossible to build a useful, mature product (plus, there's the e-penis that wants to be satisfied).

The whole deal with copyrighted software is to allow the owners to sit on their butts and let the money roll in. Without copyright, they might have to <gasp> innovate to stay ahead of their competitors!

Really, the primitive societies don't really have a concept of personal property because anything they have can be made from raw materials in less than an hour. What price stealing an arrow if you can just make one?

Here in Sweden, a lot of people get money from the state for various reasons.
There's so much work involved in making sure these people are allowed to get the money they apply for that I think it may actually be cheaper if we simply gave out a monthly sum to every citizen.

No bureaucracy, it's just a matter of distribution. The people who previously had to spend many hours monthly to fight for their right to get their money now has more free time to do something productive. And the politicians has a whole field of politics now reduced to the single question, how much should everyone get every month?

Did you miscalculate by a factor of 10?
Income 853.800.000.000
Population 9 428 054
Per capita 90559

The maths part is fine. Instead of paying a base income to only those who need it (and discouraging any efforts of picking up a low-income job), give everyone the guaranteed base income, and raise income taxes to compensate.

Simplified example. Lets assume:

• 10% of the population do not have any income at all

• 80% of the population have an average income, 10,000 GP (gold pieces) per year

• 10% of the population make ten times the average, 100k GP / yr

• To sustain a minimal lifestyle, a person needs about 5,000 GP per year

• We have a population of 1000

This means that the total amount of taxable income is 800 * 10k + 100 * 100k = 18 million GP. If we assume that the first 5000 GP (the minimum income) aren't taxed, we get 800 * 5k + 100 * 95k = 13.5 million GP.
The 10% population requires 100 * 5000 = 500k GP; this means we need a 3.7% flat income tax to be able to pay for this. The income situation is now:

• 10% of the population get 5000 GP from the state

• 80% of the population make 10k GP, paying 3.7% of 5000 in taxes, leaving them with 9815 GP

• 10% make 100k GP and pay 3.7% of 95000 in taxes, leaving them with 96,485 GP

Now let's assume the state pays 5000 GP to everyone: this will cost 1000 * 5k = 5 million GP. We can remove the 5000 tax-free GP rule (because the base income comes from the state), so we need a 27.8% tax rate on everything to finance this. The individual situations are now:

• 10% of the population gets 5000 GP from the state

• 80% of the population make 10k GP, paying 27.8% of 10k GP in taxes, leaving them with 7220 + 5000 = 12220 GP

• 10% make 100k, paying 27.8% of 100k GP in taxes, leaving them with 72,200 + 5000 = 77,200 GP

Note that the difference between both models in the richest segment can be compensated for to end up with more or less the same sums, by using different tax rates for higher and lower incomes (in a real country, there is such a difference already, but it works in the other direction, so a flat tax might actually just work). The point is that even though taxes are higher in the second example, most individual incomes are the same or higher.

It's still practically impossible though, because proposing a flat tax rate of, say, 60%, would amount to political suicide. The problem is not the maths, but the psychology. "We pay you $1500 each month, but we'll take away more than half your salary" just doesn't sound acceptable, even if you might end up with more money than you have now.