From: "herry" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> In the case
> of software piracy, the owner of the software loses nothing tangible.
The
> software is STILL THERE. What the owner loses is the POTENTIAL to make
> money.
No, you have completely failed to understand the nature of software.
Software is intellectual property. There are various means of exchanging
money for software, but the most common form is to sell a *license to use*
the software. (In exchange for $x.xx, I grant you the non-exclusive right
to use software yyyy under specified conditions.) Software piracy is theft
because an unauthorized person (the pirate) is making and distributing
(possibly modified) copies of the software. When software is pirated, the
author is not paid for the copies, so his intellectual property has been
stolen.
However, it is useless to make fine distinctions about what is or isn't
theft. Those who argue in favor of it do so because they want something for
nothing and logic is not going to dissuade them. Take Napster, for example:
copying music on the internet is easy, so people begin to believe they have
a right to do so even though it is a blatant violation of the owner's
copyright. If the same "logic" is applied to software, soon nobody will be
able to make any money creating software unless we all deliberately write
crap that no one can use and then make our money by selling services to
people who want to use our crappy free software. No one really benefits
from that scenario.
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