On Sun, 20 May 2001, Robin Szemeti wrote:
> The interesting question for me is : if I already own a paper copy of the
> book, which costs 30p to produce and the remaining £39.70 is for 'a
> licence on the copyright' .. why do I have to pay full price for a CD
> version as well? ... seems to me that I already have a licence to the
> copyright, surely I can choose to view it any manner I see fit?
Oooh, interesting.
a) Should you have a right to view the work that you have paid for a
licence wherever you are, in whatever form you see fit? Probably, yes.
b) Should you have the right to loan the work to other people (here,
borrow my book, my CD, etc?) Probably, yes.
Piracy is nothing more than doing both of these at the same time, and
that's why it's so acceptable to people (people in general, not
necessarily to me.) Personally I think the whole idea of copyright is
outdated and doesn't really work, but (as is the case for democracy) we
haven't got anything better and because it doesn't work 100% doesn't mean
I can ignore it and do what the hell I feel like.
Oh sod this discussion for a lark, I'm off to write some free software...
Later.
Mark.
--
Copyright (C) 2001 Mark Fowler. All Rights Reserved.
These views are free opinions; you can redistribute them
and/or modify them under the same terms as Perl itself.
These are my personal views, not that of my employer.
