Philosophically speaking, why shouldn't you pay for software? It's a product, same as anything else

Philosophically speaking, why shouldn't you pay for software? It's a product, same as anything else.

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Software can be easily duplicated without additional cost

But that doesn't negate that it's a product. It just means it can't be regulated the same way as physical products.

Let's just get this out of the way before there is a thread with thousands of dumb posts:

Copyright infringement is not theft.
caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/473/207.html

Piracy is violent robbery at sea, not copyright infringement.
gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Piracy

Now you can argue about the legitimacy of copyright infringement AKA unauthorized copying AKA illegal copying.

Something that can be infinitely copied has no value.

>it can't be regulated the same way as physical products
Then why can't it be monetized differently as well? Successful retail oriented software businesses charge you for subscription services, not the software itself.

Philosophically speaking, I should.

First off, it can't be infinitely copied, it's bound by pretty down to earth rules like storage capacity and whatnot. Secondly, why would it lose value if it can be copied?

By that logic, every album ever produced lost its value the moment digital music became a thing. Are you about to argue that?

The entire concept of intellectual property is cancer. Only ownership of physical substances deserves to be protected by property rights.

>caselaw.findlaw.com
yeah okay, this is probably going to be a good point
>gnu.org/philosophy
loooooooooooooooooool. As if Piracy is violent robbery at sea is a good defense. This is just arguing over the use of the word, not a good argument in favor of not doing copyright infringement. It's just Stallman trying to obscure the issue.

if its good enough you use it enough then maybe. in 2018 software is garbage as fuck so I dont blame people.

>paying for anything

MIND = BLOWN XDDDDDDD
Not even Marx's labor theory of value is that naive.

So every piece of music you ever owned is worthless? Every movie you own is worthless? Every game you own is worthless?

>not a good argument in favor of not doing copyright infringement.
It's not supposed to be an argument regarding the legitimacy of copyright infringement.

Because I can get it without paying

Philosophy is for retards

brooooo, anyone should be able to do anything so long as it doesn't hurt anyone else. brooooooo, I fucking love science.

But I do. I just don't pay for non-FOSS software.

If there is no option to pay for software I usually make a donation.

IANAL.
If I buy a DVD, I don't own the movie on it. I own the DVD and have permission to use the movie for my personal enjoyment. According to copyright law, the author "owns" the work (or whoever he sells the copyright to). You can only buy a license to use the work.
IMHO, authors should be compensated before and while publishing the work, not years after their death.

you should pay someone to make the software, not to "licence the IP". You can't own an idea user, information wants to be free.

t. zoomer

You can't own an idea, but you sure as hell can own an implementation of that idea.

I can have an idea about owning a Ferrari. Doesn't mean I own a Ferrari.

I mean you can't "own" objects or land either. You merely declare that you have exclusive rights to it.

OP is retarded and doesn't realize that free refers to freedom and not beer.

>product
product is social constract

Philosophically speaking, you should pay for software, for a limited period until that software should enter the public domain.

But corporations destroyed the public domain, so fuck them.

Also the source should be auditable for security purposes.

>Philosophically speaking, why shouldn't you pay for software? It's a product, same as anything else.
i didn't commission it
you should never expect to be paid for doing work that was not requested from you
if that were the case, we'd all be artists charging everyone that lays eyes on our shitty paintings

If it's on the internet and obtainable easily, then you're playing the game very badly.

I agree that a product is a social construct but like most social constructivists argue this doesn't mean it doesn't have meaning, value or that we should dismiss so readily. Social constructivist arguments are deflationary at best.

>you should never expect to be paid for doing work that was not requested from you
You say this and then you go out and buy shit you never imagined you wanted or wouldn't even thought of if you had a million years. How hypocritical.

>First off, it can't be infinitely copied, it's bound by pretty down to earth rules like storage capacity and whatnot.
It's close enough to infinitely copied that the going price is 0.

>Secondly, why would it lose value if it can be copied?
Because once someone has purchased/obtained one copy of the product, there can now be effectively infinite copies of the product.

It is an untenable business model that doesn't actually work without a framework of violence and coercion to prevent people from copying the product.

How much effort you put into it doesn't matter.

this is true however land and objects have had energy expended to create them, 300$ is not proportional to the energy expended to create a copy of some software.

They did because piracy. The value of 99cents a song or whatever is only valid to those who are willing to pay that 99cents. Other people like myself who think it has no monetary (only artistic value) pirate it and pay 0cents.

If corn for instance can be produced at near 0 cost should people still pay for it? I think most people would say no.

Your storage analogy is bollocks because the storage mechanism is separate and cannot be copied freely but can be used to store anything. I'm not paying for the usb drive that has windows on it, I'm paying for windows.

>By that logic, every album ever produced lost its value the moment digital music became a thing. Are you about to argue that?
That is literally what the music industry execs argued when they tried to shut down napster and other music sharing websites.

They are still being dragged into the modern world by their feet, kicking and screaming.

are you really using the "you wouldn't download a car?" argument?

But those objects/land can not be shared without reducing the access one has to them (for example using spacial partitioning).
Information can be losslessly copied.

what did i buy?

So you like consuming content, you just don't like paying for it. Got it.

Even though resources were undoubtedly required for their production, in the end they are just compilations of information. Any restrictions on information sharing are universally bad and unethical.

A fucking tent. You bought a fucking tent.

Probably the same exact tent as pictured here.

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what does "energy" mean? It seems that "energy" is needed to create software too. Even Marx's idea of "labor" would grant software as a product.

Why isn't $300 proportional? You said "300$ is not proportional to the energy expended" without explaining why? Because of wages? Market value? raw material? what?

i commissioned that

foss isn't about free beer

Philisophically speaking, I don't give a fuck

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You wanted philosophical arguments, I'm giving you your motherfucking philosophical arguments.

If the roles were reversed and it was regular joes producing content that corporations wanted to copy, the lawyers would be telling everyone to go fuck themselves the corporations are entitled to it for all the reasons listed above.

The simple FACT is that software has no actual value once it has been produced. Only the production itself has value, but you can't easily get people to pay for production rather than finished product.

Nevertheless in homogenous and especially homogenous white societies, people still pay for software out of goodwill and respect, even when it's unnecessary to do so.

If you tried telling a business professor 60 years ago that your business model was one where you'd spend millions developing a product to sell for $50 a pop and could be instantly and infinitely copied by the first person to buy it, he'd call you a fucking moron and fail your from his class.

No you were walking down a street one day, and this giant ad in the corner of your eye had that tent pictured and 2 months later you bought it. Or maybe you saw it on the TV. Or maybe your neighbor John bought it and suddenly you wanted it too. It's most certain that you didn't produce a unique thought when considering buying that fucking tent.

You're brainwashed by the culture, not the other way around. Best to face it as soon as possible.

Politically speaking, i don't have to pay to foreigners if there is a means to avoid it because foreigners are irrelevant.

while information as defined by Shannon (or the early cybernetians) would agree that information can be losslessly copied that doesn't necessarily mean 1) that computational power required to instantiate information isn't 2) that this entails non-ownership. Facsimiles appear to still have value.

As a consumer, you have a choice to simply not consume. It's your own character flaw that makes you desire both to consume and not pay for it, presumably because you're so much better than anyone else.

Not trying to attack you personally, just trying to speedrun the argument.

i commissioned my tent
i commissioned my kayak too

whether or not my thoughts were unique is not relevant
i requested the items, i provided an upfront payment for items before the production of my items began, my items were produced, and my items were then brought to me
note when i added possessiveness in my statement, that is the point at which the items became something i commissioned

i paid for a service to produce items, i paid for material for items, i commissioned these items

But you never had a unique idea and produced it. You simply bought the product because you saw it being used someplace else.

Point is you buy shit you didn't want to buy a month ago, because you're being played by the culture.

I'm not a consumer

it is not anywhere close the to cost to produce. the margins are too high, if capitalism is working in theory the price should converge towards the cost, however monopoly and cabals stop this from happening.

We're all consumers. You're consuming a PC right now

you can make an attempt to score all the points you wish in an argument but i had never agreed to play this ruleset of a game with you in the first place
the effort you exert will be fruitless and not grant you a win, as you're refusing to participate in the terms agreed upon

the subject of this thread is the philosophical debate of paying for software, and when the software producer deserves to be paid
the software producer deserves to be paid by the person commissioning the software producer, at a time they agree upon before the work is finished

I'm responding to you directly. You said and I quote
>you should never expect to be paid for doing work that was not requested from you

Which is fair enough from the perspective of the worker. But it's absolutely stupid when you consider the whole picture. You're basically saying that you should only reward your own unique ideas. But then you go out, take a fucking train ride, use your smartphone, get yourself a cannabis flavored ice cream and buy a tricycle. None of those things were things "you commissioned", heck, you couldn't even conceive they existed before they were presented to you at some point in your life. You most certainly didn't request them either.

Why should I pay for something I can easily obtain without paying? It's immoral.

Consumer is a corporate word to dehumanize you.

You're a customer, you buy things, you do not consume them. If you consume it presupposes that you never had a choice.

The intent of modern corporatism is to create a neofeudal pan-communist society where the economy is centrally controlled and planned out. That's what consumerism is about. That's what the word consumer implies: You're not a human being, you're a thing that consumes resources, services, and products, and it's up to the corporation to both give you things to consume and tell you what you want to consume.

Why in the fuck would you want to associate yourself with such a dystopian system with people who hold you in utter contempt to such a degree that you're not even human to them?

which is all not relevant at all, as we're talking about the custom of currency exchange, rewarding service
humans, civilization, and the sharing of knowledge predate currency

that an idea is not unique is not relevant to this subject
this line of conversation needs not go further, as it is not what we are talking about in this thread

rant elsewhere

What you're saying is essentially, fuck all art since that's useless, the only thing worth money is something I need right now.

I get it, but it's fucking stupid.

It's not a product as any other. It's a mathematical solution to a problem.

There are many useful things that aren't worth any money.
When's the last time you paid for gravity or solar radiation?

that is a possible interpretation, but the meat of my statement is more about the producer's expectations for payment

as a worker, it's a gamble to spend your personal time producing something that you have not been paid for in advance to
if you do get paid, think of it as a charity, a bonus for what you have done, that some philanthropist appreciated your work so much that they decided to reward you
but to expect payment from a stranger is a mistake, the stranger doesn't owe you something just because they use your product

that there is software controlling the train crossing lights so that i know not to cross the tracks at a certain time does not mean that i am going to foot the bill when stopped safely

i'm not against selling software per se, the most problematic aspect is the fact that you don't know what you're buying with software. if you buy a truck, a car, a refrigerator, you can always open it up and see what's inside. You can go online and download a maintenance manual and be able to fix it and modify it no problem.
With software, you don't know what you're getting. You don't actually own the product you get. You can't modify it, you can't fix it, you can't actually make sure it doesn't spy on you.

It's a natural response to the exact same behaviour by corporate entities in our culture and communities.

We've been shown that externalities like culture and racial homogenity don't matter. We're all just one mass of consumers to be exploited and controlled.

Well, if that's how it is, this zero sum game, then don't complain when the same rules are applied to corporations and we freely share and copy products without giving a fuck about the original entities involved.

Perhaps in a better society I might stop and say, "the artist deserves compensation for this", but these 'artists' are big corporations effectively destroying society around me. Frankly, the moral thing to do is to avoid paying them anything at all.

So you wouldn't say the same about, say, indie game devs?

They still have a terrible business model.

But I would actually feel bad if an indie dev with an excellent game went unsupported, unloved, and bankrupt.
I wouldn't give a flying fuck about EA though.

In both cases the business model is shit, but in the former case I would (and have) supported the dev rather than copying his shit for free.
EA in contrast, I don't even play their games anymore. They can fuck off.

Everyone hates EA, but what about the good AAA houses? Like Project Red, Black Isle, etc.?

My point is you may be overgeneralizing.

>indie game devs
depends on the dev
I bought both starbound and factorio, one of them delivered the other is a failure to this day
the lesson to be learned is don't buy vidya that lacks a demo

Do you even fucking know what supply and demand is? The whole reason most shit is expensive is because it's difficult to make multiples of it, or in most cases because companies are controlling how many products will be sold at once.
If you were to print 100x more USD/per day the value of a $ would decrease significantly. If you were to suddenly find a mine with thousands of tons of diamonds and mine it the value of diamonds would drop down to the value of plastic. The first already happened in Germany once. As for the latter, there was a point when diamonds were mined in a massive surplus but they were kept in warehouses to make sure the price doesn't halve over night.

Are you retarded or just pretending?

There is no coercion.
If you redistribute music in violation of the license agreement, you've violated the NAP. Their "coercion" is just self-defense.

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If I go and hear a symphony and remember a particular melody and play it in my head do I have to pay for copyright infringement?

Ideas are just ideas, no one owns them.

You should pay for it. Saying "because I'm a piece of shit" is a justification, just not a very valid one. "Because I'm broke" is a little better, maybe. Everyone on Jow Forums is morally bankrupt as fuck though so I won't bother going further.

You're paying with your electricity bill if you compile it yourself. :^)
But, no, in seriousness: software should be distributed openly for the same reasons the insides of household objects aren't kept secret.
Copyleft vs. permissive is another topic.

My point is, there's more to the situation than game theory dictates, and companies like EA squander goodwill for temporary profits.

Selling software as a business SHOULD NOT WORK.

But it does. And it does for two reasons:

1. People understand time and effort and like to reward it even when they don't have to, because this benefits the overall community. This is an evolutionary trait and you see it more often in racially homogenous high-trust societies.

2. Corporations have lobbied for laws that effectively criminalize copying despite how the wider culture views it. In this way they use threats of violence, and actual violence, against their potential customers in order to force them to buy their products instead of sharing and copying the products. This naturally degrades goodwill and requires more and more enforcement effort as time wears on.

To put this another way, modern capitalism and corporations have not factored in human morality to their business decisions. These corporations make decisions in a vacuum, and in the short term a lot of their decisions make sense, but in the long term they are enormously self destructive.

Why do humans have morals at all? If immoral sociopathy is the most successful path, then naturally everyone would be an immoral sociopath, yet they aren't. Morality is just an evolved intuitive sense of "doing this does not work very well in the long run". Corporations don't have this innate evolved sense of morality, and so they do very immoral and self destructive things - like using advertising to brainwash customers, or flooding nations with millions of foreign slaves to collapse wages.

These policies work in the short term, but in the long term they will and are, negatively affecting profits.

>moral obligations towards foreigners for shitty software
LEL

Jesus, please fuck off you faggot.

When you pay for something, your paying for something physical, like a disc, not the data contained therein. You are buying that CD because you want the offical printed CD.

Epic dude
Except value is determined by others' views of the thing, not the physical nature of the thing.
If you download and use a program I've made, you find it valuable, whether you like it or not. If you didn't, you wouldn't be using it.
Retard

Whether I find it valuable or not doesn't mean I'm going to pay you, asshole.

Why do you think you're owed the fruit of someone else's labor which they have designated as "not free for you", faggot? If it's "shit made by foreigners" and you really don't value whatever it is, you wouldn't bother using it in the first place

>Why do you think you're owed the fruit of someone else's labor

Literally because I can.

Don't like it? Stop making software you fragile snowflake.

What makes you as a foreigner think I owe shit to you beyond on a whim when you are not even a tax payer in my locality (therefore attaining the minimum required moral connection) nor anyone who would stand next to me in war if my nation was attacked?
Save your morality for when it's worth a wipe of my ass.

See
This is what I mean OP, no sense in trying to convince people with absolutely zero moral compass to be decent. We're on an anime site after all

I think they're incapable of understanding this. It's like their brain has a block on that particular reasoning circuit, and they just keep wiring around it, not realizing how stupid they look.

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It's just a continuation of modern corporate policy.

If you're behaving in a selfless moral and altruistic way, you'll be taken advantage of like the sucker you are by corporations that have no similar moral compunctions.

Their behaviour dictates the individuals' resulting behaviour.

Piracy is bad because (((they))) don't like it. I only pay for software I want to support. And in most cases I wouldn't even use certain software if I had to pay for it.

Just because something is not theft doesn't mean it isn't infringement on someone's property rights.

Unless I'm distributing copies and making money off of someone else's IP, there's no reason I shouldn't be able to copy something for my own use

im not saying that this example applies to all software, but there is an essence of this mentality in not paying for software:

early in the days of personal computing, software game companies would release games that would fail at unpredictable times for inexplicable reasons; these games were expensive - maybe 40 to 50 dollars, which, in the 80s, were quite expensive; as the gaming industry developed, and games became more complex, the kinds of bugs that would show up would become more prevalent, or catastrophic; some bugs would actually damage the operating system; then there came a time when games could be downloaded for free because they could be hacked; it was a kind of vindication for all the games that had been purchased with the expectation of the game working, but the game didn't work - the company had actually sold a half-finished product - and where was the "warranty"?; once you opened the package, you could not return it, even though the game didn't fully work

this same analogy applies to the download of music, in which Sony and others ripped off consumers long after the cost of making CDs had come down; the same for the download of movies, in which garbage movies were presented at Blockbuster or Movie gallery and you never got a refund because the movie was shit

thats just my opinion anyway; gamers still do the beta tests for certain games these days (No Man's Sky); there's probably a fair middle ground, but we haven't come to it yet

>People gettin mad at software sharing and copying

yo dog hol up lemme help u

Look at what steam is doing and copy them.

People buy steam games because there's a lot of value-add from the steam purchase. Friends' lists, modding support, workshop, post-release updates, community, ease of purchase, low price, sales, etc. etc.

Valve and Gabe correctly deduced that while people will copy freely when they can, if there is a little bit of extra value to a legitimate purchase - that is to say, if you further incentivize a legit purchase with things you cannot get from a pirated copy - then people will fucking flock to you and your shekelgrubbing.

Valve is basically thirty steps ahead of the competition and it shows. They've practically got a fucking monopoly on game distribution now. Only GoG is a semi-viable competitor, and they've got a lot of work on the value add parts that steam's already nailed before they're remotely serious competition.

Are you a software dev? Do you want people to buy your shit instead of pirating?
Then you need something like Steam to put your software on.

If nobody steps up into this space in due course of time, Steam/Valve will proably do it themselves.

If it's shit made by foreigners and the shit is valued while the foreigner is not, and he gets his hands on it through various maneuvering, then he is engaging what is called political interest and trade war by pulling a good towards his country at the expense of your own, which is a daily and normal activity on the global trade network and a morally righteous activity from the standpoint of the nation gaining from it. Morality ultimately rests upon the shoulders of those who have the power to police it, and since his nation has less interest in policing for some dumbfaggot outsider like yourself and more interest in protecting their own citizenry, and since your own nation is not retarded enough to engage in trade war with another government because of a butthurt faggot losing on the least relevant economic good - software, then the discussion of morality and ethics is moot.
I don't know where you got your business knowledge from, but it is a known fact that the economic unions places digital goods (software) on the tertiary category in the ledgers and therefore governments deem it an irrelevant category to engage in sanctions and wars over. Your arguments are simply either politically irrelevant, or irrelevant by effect of the very global market which deems digital goods as cancerous and volatile goods irrelevant to survival and too oversaturated with shit to mean anything.

As somebody who is making a video game, I am doing it for the passion I have for video games AND I want to earn a livelihood from it. If I just gave my game away for free upon completing it, I will continue to be poor and my lot in life is going to be total shit.

Do you think I could possibly live by putting out my game for free and then putting up a patreon/donation link saying "Hey. If you enjoyed my game and don't want me to be homeless, please share a few bucks!"? I don't believe that would work.

Maybe, I just might, make a promise to share my source code and assets if I reach a certain amount of money. Make me comfortably rich and then the files to improve my game and port it to everything is yours.

Learn to use paragraph breaks newfag, your posts are unreadable.

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Theres nothing wrong with selling proprietary software. The question is why would I buy it when there are free (and gratis) alternatives that are just as good or sometimes even better?

I read them perfectly well.
You are just buttblasted.

>I read them

Enjoy being the only one that does

>"Hey. If you enjoyed my game and don't want me to be homeless, please share a few bucks!"? I don't believe that would work.
I guess you've missed all the people doing exactly this and making a living from it?

The key part with patreon is that you never actually FINISH what you're working on. I think there's a lot of people who don't quite get this yet. You will make more money if you tell people you're intending to just keep working on xyz thing for as long as you're getting funds for it.

And if your xyz thing is something people really like, they are going to throw money at you to make sure you keep making that thing that they like even better.

People love to get online at the end of the week to check updates on their favourite games and see what new content is available.
Be that guy providing that value to people and you'll get money.

The hardest part of all is breaking out into the normiesphere to get patreons in the first place.

>If I just gave my game away for free upon completing it, I will continue to be poor and my lot in life is going to be total shit.
Only if you are shit at it.
Incompetech gives out free music under a free license and aside from being rich from user donations who respect him and his work, even publishing houses pay him the usual license fee despite no obligations to do so. The only thing he asks for is to be credited wherever possible. Part of all of this is because he is not a whiny cunt.
Other examples:
There's a guy on Patreon who makes 3D porn of Lara Croft being fucked by a Horse, and got 10k a month for it at one point.
There's niche as niche can be porn RPG makers like Hreinn who make 5k a month and up to over 10k with update releases, with public free releases some time after the release.
You are simply shit, that's the gist of it.