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Oh come on. It's easy to call someone a hypocrite -- everyone agrees its wrong, whatever their other moral principles might be. The failures of an individual don't really have much bearing on whether the individual's moral beliefs are right. EDIT: changed "everyone agrees its wrong" to "everyone agrees hypocrisy is wrong"
Are you saying everyone agrees piracy is wrong? In my mind that's very much still open to debate.
Oh come on. It's easy to call someone a hypocrite -- everyone agrees its wrong, whatever their other moral principles might be. The failures of an individual don't really have much bearing on whether the individual's moral beliefs are right. EDIT: changed "everyone agrees its wrong" to "everyone agrees hypocrisy is wrong"
If you assume they're failures, they don't have much bearing. If, however, you assume that people's actions reflect their beliefs more closely than their arguments do, the fact of hypocrisy regarding a given belief suggests rather strongly that even the person making the argument doesn't believe it. When an argument's proponents don't even believe it, I think it's reasonably strong evidence that it isn't true.
This still doesn't change the fact that piracy does hurt authors. The sad fact is that piracy is only getting worse. Even when you can get a song for 99 cents with no DRM or restrictions, music piracy is still rampant. I'm waiting for the next set of excuses. In '99, it was because music was too expensive and the artists were getting screwed (which is a funny excuse, because 1% of something is something, but 1% of 0…
I can remember being a kid in the 70s and 80s and we all borrowed albums from friends and made copies on cassette tapes.
Or at least all my friends did.... ;-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Duplicate it at no cost to anyone except yourself, I think you mean. It often does cost time and money to pirate things. And now that RepRap and similar 3D object printers are becoming more popular, they will continue to come down in price. It won't be long before printing physical items is a possibility, and then wholesale pirating of things that used to be protected by patents will start. And if you're having troub…
Can you actually think of any examples where "printing" 3D objects that are protected by patents is likely to be a problem in the foreseeable future?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Duplicate it at no cost to anyone except yourself, I think you mean. It often does cost time and money to pirate things. And now that RepRap and similar 3D object printers are becoming more popular, they will continue to come down in price. It won't be long before printing physical items is a possibility, and then wholesale pirating of things that used to be protected by patents will start. And if you're having troub…
Can you actually think of any examples where "printing" 3D objects that are protected by patents is likely to be a problem in the foreseeable future?
One of the first markets I can see this disrupting are things like war-gaming miniatures, and board gaming pieces, which have a HUGE markup, but could be reproduced in plastic relatively easily after a more few generations of this tech. I'm not sure about patents per-se, but it's certainly an intellectual property issue.
Once these printers gain the ability to draw circuits and build or insert basic electronic components, things will really take off, but even before then there are some big markets for what are basically hunks of plastic and metal that are only expensive because they're well designed/marketed.
Will you be printing off an iPhone in 5 years? Of course not. But that fancy $60 paperweight on your boss's desk? There's a big market for those too.
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Can you actually think of any examples where "printing" 3D objects that are protected by patents is likely to be a problem in the foreseeable future?
I don't know, but the underlying problem is very real: counterfeit goods.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you actually think of any examples where "printing" 3D objects that are protected by patents is likely to be a problem in the foreseeable future?
I think that it depends on your definition of 'foreseeable'. One of the first markets I can see this disrupting are things like war-gaming miniatures, and board gaming pieces, which have a HUGE markup, but could be reproduced in plastic relatively easily after a more few generations of this tech. I'm not sure about patents per-se, but it's certainly an intellectual property issue. Once these printers gain the ability…
Not condoning piracy, but simply an observation. (I'm skeptical that people who pirate the e-books would necessarily otherwise purchase them, so I'm always uncertain about estimates of "losses" like in this article. Many times someone will download it to just check it out, similar to flipping through it in a bookstore, which you don't have to pay for.)
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Except that wildlife is a limited resource that needs to be protected from poachers. It's only like piracy if you think there is an unlimited supply of wildlife that anyone should be able to take as they like.
An ebook, mp3, or other digital object can be considered an unlimited resource, the creator of said object is a limited resource, and they do deserve protection. That said, authors and artists like the lady in the article are hurting themselves when they choose not to make their works available to people in the format they want, especially when it is very easy to convert those works into different formats, or at leas…
One consequence, it seems, would be that a work would enter public domain as soon as the creator dies, since the only remaining resource (the digital work) is unlimited.