So, if I buy a single copy and install it on my 2 macs that is bad karma, evil doing, stealing and will get me straight to hell? But if apple sells me an iMac that is freezing 3 times a week and it takes them 3 months to come up with a fix that is perfectly ok? Something is seriously wrong here.
Warning: Friday wind-down follows, cos Apple's
one day UK sale is srsly lacking.
Going into meta-debate mode for a moment, the problem with a thread full of moral rather than technical/legal judgments is that people omit to state their premises. You're having three dozen people tell you that what you're doing is immoral; what that means is, "I, your castigator, subscribe to moral code X, which I have concluded prohibits what you're doing."
Any post condemning you thus likely contains one of two implicit messages:
- You are subscribing to an incorrect moral code;
- You may have a good moral code, but you're not applying it correctly.
Usually the person ends up justifying their act, and it comes down to the first message. The debate then either becomes one of belief systems or degenerates into people repeatedly spewing out the same logic without realising that they're
working from different axioms. Failing to come to this realisation, many commenters end up stating something like, "Stealing is wrong because it's taking work from another without their permission." But the real meat of that sentence is the definition "taking work from another without their permission" for "stealing". It can then be shortened to "stealing is wrong because it's stealing", which is unhelpful.
Let's consider the origins of copyright. I'm unaware of copyright being codified because of any sort of "it's wrong to steal" principle. In C15-16 Italy the State/Church would grant
privilegium for a limited time to those in their rulers' favour - hence the need for mathematicians, scientists, etc to gain patronage. Where the grip of the State was not so tight as to otherwise prohibit publication, most books would go into the public domain. Looking to England for the first copyright act, the 1710
Statute of Anne broke the monopoly on printing "for the Encouragement of Learning". Any US schoolchild will have, in his study of Section 8 of
The Constitution, learnt the purpose of Copyright law there to have been stated as "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Intellectual property was created as a concept to benefit society by encouraging scientific and artistic innovation by providing productive thinkers with a limited monopoly (14 years iirc for Anne).
Capitalism's recent success has brought free market philosophers to develop systems in which it is asserted that man owns his thoughts as he might own his shirt. This idea is far from self-evident; to Platonists or Pythagoreans, one's intellectual ability was a gift, with which came duty to be virtuous by applying that knowledge to enlighten others. This humanist ideal was developed in the Neohumanism displayed by some of the more successful technical authors of C16 - Recorde, Dee, influenced by Ramus; they published on geometry, on arithmetic, on navigation, etc. to educate the merchant classes, to improve the fairness of application of law, and to destroy the blinkers of authoritarianism. Newton was one of a chain of innovators who, perhaps prodding fun at his dimuntive rival, trotted out the "shoulders of giants" maxim - every thought is due to the input of many other thoughts, and every work is a
derivative work of many other works.
Anyway, my point with this is that most of us have made money from selling our brainpower, but the fact that we're protected when doing this is likely because philosophers and lawmakers before us have seen the benefit to society, not because they consider an inherent right to intellectual property. To discuss the alternative views on the moral basis for copyright (or lack thereof) is interesting, but to so harshly condemn a man for a minor violation in this particular case is not only entirely unproductive, but is to take a fairly narrow, modern conception of copyright and try to impose it on a world which was not even built on that conception.
(Knee-jerk flame caveat: No, reader, I didn't just say we can all steal your hard work.
)
