It congealed from an amorphous mass of nutrients in the bowels of the earth. What does it matter where it came from? Stealing deprives the owner of their good, copyright infringement does not, therefore they are not equal.
Sure. Your remarks only prove my point. But I am a realist. And I wouldn't keep focusing on music. It's an easy target. Audio happens to be my thing but I'm concerned at the cavalier attitude and on a broader level.
Let's for one minute, expand the remit. It's not funkwhale, it's carwhale, foodwhale, healthwhale. Keep going. Keep thinking.
If all we're doing is not creating anew, but instead forging special keys that give you access to anything anyone that made the considerable effort to creative something new - then we treadwater, as a human race. And I see exactly this in so many aspects of human life already.
Not creating, not moving forward, not innovating, and only taking (in this case) other people's music AND then, here, loudly having the arrogance to declare that all music (or cars, or health, or food) should be free to buy once and you get the right to give it away.
Don't complain, like I have often read on these pages, how modern music (and cars, and food, and apps, and laptops) all look and sound the same when we have merrily sucked dry the very chances of anything new making its first steps.
You're describing a post-scarcity utopia where we can spend our creative energy where we want and not be tied down to jobs that we hate in order to pay the bills.
Yes, I would very much like that for everyone. Thank you for bringing this topic up. Let it come.
You insist on reading my argument of "it's not the same as theft" to "therefore it's fine". I didn't say whether it's better or worse than theft. I just said it's not the same, in the same way that murder or jaywalking is not the same as theft.
Not true, I'm not doing that, though you do seem to be reading parts of my remarks and not others. I shouldn't have replied specifically to you, I'm trying, and failing on deaf ears, to make a much broader point. I'll save it for the pub.
There's a short sci-fi story (whose name escapes me, but is mentioned in Cory Doctorow's Information Doesn't Want to be Free) in which the human race is given matter duplicators that can perfectly copy an item, including the duplicators themselves. It's basically a more fully-explored version of the "what if I can copy a car" thought, in which I think the conclusion is that creativity would flourish because less effort is put into making many of the same item. It's quite a far-reaching hypothetical, but it has strong parallels with digital rights issues.
