[plug] Gary ... was Re: "stealing"

[Mike Holland]

On Fri, 15 Nov 2002, James Elliott wrote:

> There is also a lot of concern in the music and general publishing world,
> and it is not too hard to see their point ... if pirate copies are freely
> available who is going to pay $65 to purchase a video movie or $20 for a

I'm not totally against copyright, but who needs copyright for music? Most 
musicians dont make any money, but do it for love. Successful bands make 
millions (for SOny,EMI etc) from concerts and merchandising. I dont think 
the workld would suffer too much if music copyright was abolished. You 
could even pass a law so shopfront record shops paid $1 royalty to 
the artist for every ablum burnt, for example.

  As for movies, they could survive on cinema sales. It might do Hollywood 
some good to cut their budgets too. How many $100million movies are half 
as good as low-budget flicks like Mad Max or Casablance?

  What would happen if software copyright were abolished??

- lots of annoying adverts in some software.
- corporate and government grants to universities etc to write software.
- more open-source.

We might be worse off without copyright, but it is a debatable point.
Perhaps we have gotten past the point where its needed.

> Are programmers less professional than muso's?  Should they not get paid for
> their work?

Should we as a society pay a sculptor or composer just because they work 
hard? If they work to a commissioned job, they get paid.

> software.  But what incentive is there to lock oneself away for hundreds if
> not thousands of hours to produce some elegant and useful software if, by it

Because a company pays you to write it so they can use it. Thats the usual 
way. In the absense of copyright, there would be others willing to pay 
you. It would bring prestige to a university if their spreadsheet was the 
most popular.

> very usefulness and excellence it is going to attract the attention of the
> pirates .... who should profit from the programmer's work? - the programmer
> or the pirate?

Without copyright, there are no pirates.

And while I'm at it, cut copyright to 10 years max for books. Where is the 
logic in 100-year copyright?

-- 
        The origin of Truth is Doubt - Socrates