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| title | date | draft | type | tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sharing is Caring | 2021-04-30 | true | post |
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Originally posted on my old blog
In an in an interview a few days ago, Richard Stallman was asked how publishers should sell copyrighted works. His response:
The words you are using, I will not accept. I'm not going to answer that question because to do it I would have to accept the concept of piracy and the concept of protected and I will not. I refuse to use them. When people, when they say piracy what they mean is sharing. It's a smear term to insult people who share. I will not smear sharing. I think sharing is good and stopping people from sharing is evil. Now I when they say protected, what they really mean is restricting. And I think that's bad. However I am in favor of supporting artists better. The existing system changes so as to support artists less and less. Now this has become a scandal in the field of music as the streaming disservices pay musicians so little when streaming their music that the musicians are basically going broke. What this shows by the way is the hypocrisy of the copyright system which ostensibly exists to support the artists. But in fact it supports businesses that screw the artists.
Keep in mind that Stallman also said that "for other kinds of works, such as artistic works and works of testimony, it's okay for those works to be copyrighted" in the same interview.
So I'm going to make this loud and clear: If you download a file that you were not willing to pay for in the first place, there is no economic loss to the publisher. I'm not advocating this, I'm just putting out the obvious. Publishers don't care about people who weren't willing to pay in the first place; they're worried that massive sharing would lead to customers that would actually pay end up just downloading files for free.
Also, if you never pay for games, you can get an infinite number of games for zero dollars! Obvious, right?
So there you have it. A disorganized ejection of various ideas about sharing. I might add some more arguments if I think of more obvious truths about this topic.