More on manuals plus rescue

Mouse mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG
Thu Aug 20 12:40:24 CDT 2015


> If someone sells property he owns, you have a choice: you can spend your mon$

True.  Also irrelvant; those "selling" PDFs are not selling their
property, and the ways in which those selling papers manuals are are
not relevant to this discussion.  Nor does the making or distribution
of unauthorized copies constitute stealing.

Copyright violation is not theft.  (That doesn't make it OK.  I just
get so sick of people tossing around emotionally loaded words like
"theft" and "stealing" when discussing copyright violation I feel it
incumbent on me to point out that they are not accurate.)

The PDF "sellers" are not selling their property; they are selling
right-to-copy.  The paper manual sellers _are_ selling their property,
the physical artifacts, but the discussion has been about copyright,
and they too are not selling their intellectual property, only the
instantiation of a copy of it and the accompanying right to that copy.

The ubiquity of this sort of confusion, and the logic-chopping
necessary for it to make any kind of sense, are among the reasons I
think intellectual property is a failed experiment.  (That too neither
justifies nor excuses ignoring intellectual property law, mind.)

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