From: Ryan Leavengood <leavengood@...>
Date: 2006-05-17T03:41:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Ticked Off

I agree with the general sentiment in Austin's first message: David
has given a lot to the Ruby community and he deserves proper
compensation for his book, which I'm sure required a lot of effort to
write.

But I do not agree with all the sentiments about copyright
infringement being theft. Denying someone potential income by
downloading a copy of their work is NOT like taking money from their
pocket. That is like me saying another Ruby programmer is stealing
from me for getting a consulting contract for a Rails project that I
felt I should have gotten. Potential income is not like money in the
bank. Now I'm not saying that downloading stuff is right or moral. If
someone is trying to sell a product, something they have put a lot of
time and effort to create, one should not acquire it without the
author being paid.

Still, I think some new thought needs to be put into copyright law
given the modern digital age. Right now the system is broken because
copyright has been changed from being something that is designed for
public good to something that is designed to maximize profits for
copyright holders (which are usually large, powerful, multinational
corporations.) Copyright is supposed to expire fairly soon so that
artistic works go into the public domain and can then be built open
and expanded, adding knowledge and beauty to the culture. But that is
not how things are now. Disney has been spear-heading the constant
increase of copyright expiration length in the US so that Steamboat
Willy (the first Mickey Mouse cartoon) will not go into the public
domain. I'm not sure why they want to do this, because I don't think
they are making any money off it anymore, plus it becoming public
domain does not release their trademark on Mickey. Maybe they are just
evil ;)

<us_centric>
But the point is copyright is not what the founders of the US intended
it to be anymore, and that needs to be fixed. I'm not sure if our
current lobbyist-controlled Congress is capable of making this change,
so I'm not sure what the solution is.
</us_centric>

A final point I want to make is this: a lot of people think that
without copyright nothing creative or artistic would ever be created.
This is just nonsense. For one thing, many beautiful works of art and
great literature was created before the concept of copyright existed.
A more contemporary example is open source software and the world wide
web. While some people can make money tangentially to their open
source work or their web-site, many people create things with no
monetary incentive. Just something to think about.

Ryan