Earlier quoted context omitted.
The loss I've suffered is the loss of the right to attempt to sell your friend the file under the terms I want to set. I have the right to set those terms because I did the work of creating the artifact. You're completely allowed to find that a bizarre thing to protect, but you're not free to just declare that view the only reasonable one and expect no one to argue. If I made my livelihood by designing homes, and I w…
> but you're not free to just declare that view the only reasonable one and expect no one to argue To be fair, I believe I am free in my expectations and declarations. I didn't and don't expect that however. > right to attempt to sell your friend the file under the terms I want to set To attempt a sale is not a right, at least not one I am familiar with. > You dragging a dropping a icon representing the bits on a har…
It's called "copyright". You have the right to control distribution of your creative work. A direct and unavoidable implication of that is the right to try to sell it.
> Actually, in as much as that is included in the archival process, I disagree.
Archival doesn't produce a creative act by either common sense or legal interpretation. You can add value of course by writing backup programs or just doing the work of backing people's files up, so arguably I didn't choose my words carefully enough there. But the thing you created was the process of doing the archiving. You're entitled to control of and credit for that work, but not the actual files that your process created. Writing a program that saves the text of an ebook doesn't make me the author of the book.
> Good thing Disney has nothing to do with it, otherwise copyright might stretch out to over a century.
I completely agree, but it's irrelevant to the discussion of whether or not copyright as a concept should exist.