Re: [LAD] RAUL?

On Wednesday 16 November 2011, at 10.57.47, Louigi Verona <louigi.verona(a)gmail.com> wrote: I don't know about other people here, but I've only got 24 hours a day, some of which are lost to sleep and other activities, and I've most likely got only a few decades left to live. Time is a very scarce resource indeed. Unfortunately, I've "wasted" most of my life so far on programming, music and various other things that are hard enough to make a living off of regardless of laws and other tools. Selling anything is really just "suggesting" that people pay for it, as only a few percent of the consumers will anyway. That part is not really a problem, though! The *actual* market is only those few percent anyway, the rest concisting mostly of people that would just not bother if they couldn't get it for free. More importantly, that last group gives you free distribution and marketing! So, from that point of view, copyright law is pretty much useless anyway. It's fighting a hopeless battle against the very nature of these things, and trying to enforce it is anything from pointless through devastatingly counterproductive. So, it could definitely be argued that copyright law is irrelevant in this context. However, if just any business was legally allowed take anyone's "intellectual property" and make money off of it, paying no royalties or anything, that would be a problem. How would one prevent that without copyright law or similar tools? Never releasing any source code? Never releasing anything at all? (No significant difference in this context. Comments are mostly garbage anyway, and machine code is just another language.) As to motivation, well sure, there will always be people doing all sorts of stuff just for fun, self-education etc - or because they just need it to get some job done. Unfortunately, in the case of music, video games and various other things, the interesting part of making a polished, thoroughly enjoyable and/or useful product is generally only some 10% of the work. The rest is just hard, boring, frustrating work that will rarely ever get done without some other motivation than the work itself. It's not the kind of work that attracts contributors to a Free/Open Source project either, in cases where that is even applicable. One could argue that "entertainment products" aren't really necessary anyway, so it wouldn't matter if people stopped making them. By that logic however, if you don't need the products, you don't need to pay for them either, so where's the problem...? (Personally, I'll never rely on a proprietary, closed source engine or development tool ever again if I can help it, but that's a different situation altogether.) -- //David Olofson - Consultant, Developer, Artist, Open Source Advocate .--- Games, examples, libraries, scripting, sound, music, graphics ---. | http://consulting.olofson.net http://olofsonarcade.com | '---------------------------------------------------------------------'