Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mandrill!gatech!uflorida!novavax!maddoxt
From: maddoxt@novavax.UUCP (Thomas Maddox)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Piracy
Summary: few simple answers
Keywords: copy protection piracy
Message-ID: <501@novavax.UUCP>
Date: 29 May 88 21:38:45 GMT
References: <9160@cisunx.UUCP> <1801@uhccux.UUCP> <807@netxcom.UUCP> <1641@looking.UUCP> <174@proxftl.UUCP> <1654@looking.UUCP> <895@actnyc.UUCP>
Reply-To: maddoxt@novavax.UUCP (Thomas Maddox)
Organization: Nova University, Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Lines: 68


	I have been following this discussion of piracy with special
interest because, unlike the majority of discussants, I am not a
programmer, but I am a producer of intellectual property, i.e., a
writer.  My sense is that we do not yet understand *information as
property* fully enough to make absolute pronouncements; that the
moral terrain outlined by issues such as software piracy is not yet
clearly mapped.  Thus the following remarks are more on the order 
of tentative explorations than definitive mappings.   

	Perhaps it would make sense to say that I produce a kind of
software; certainly it makes sense to say that I produce artifacts
that have many of the characteristics of programs.  My intellectual 
property, like the programmer's, requires an extraordinary effort to 
produce:  the 7000 word story that appears in _Omni_, say, represents 
a profound investment of all my talents and skills, whatever they might 
be. 
 
	So, if you copy one of these stories and give it to your friends, 
are you stealing from me?  Well, yes.   Technically, you should buy the 
magazine (or whatever) in question and not make use of available xeroxing.  
Practically, a great deal of copying does take place, at least some of it 
in violation of copyright.  Yet, few of us writers yell about such piracy;
instead, we do so in the cases where someone markets our work without 
acknowledgement or pay.  In short, the fact that you might xerox a story, 
even a book, then do it again for a friend, and so on . . . it simply 
doesn't bother me much.

	If I were a programmer, however, I suspect I would feel
differently--*perhaps* because the money to be made programming is on
the whole (or on the average) much more than the money to be made
writing fiction.  In short, by xeroxing my _Omni_ story, you really
don't steal much from me.  However, if I write a useful MSDOS utility,
and you steal that, then you may be stealing quite a bit more.  

	Someone quoted, sarcastically, the tale about George Bernard
Shaw and the great lady, the point of which is that having sex with
someone for money is prostitution, whether the fee is $1 or
$1,000,0000.  While it is a charming story, its point runs counter to
our experience of morality:  misdemeanors are not felonies, no
matter that both might be crimes; petty theft is not grand theft, etc.
In short, I think part of the problem here is that we live in a
culture which winks at several kinds of piracy (to add to previous
examples, taping music and films in violation of copyright) and thus
creates a morally ambiguous climate with regard to other piracies.

	Also, I think most of us feel that intellectual property
really is different somehow from material property, that xeroxing my
story is different from stealing my computer, as it were.  We live in
a time when information has just recently become known as a thing with
properties of its own, apart from whatever medium in which it might be
manifested; it is not unreasonable to suppose that new concepts of
property might have to evolve with regard to information.

	(As an aside, I believe most of us are committed in some way
to the free flow of information; we feel that a culture which
generates such a flow is a more open and civilized culture than one
which does not.  Thus, we may be caught on the point where the right
to personal property conflicts with this more general principle that
dissemination of information is a good thing.)

	Finally, I do not believe that capitalism and socialism are at
all the issue here.  Only the most primitive and otherworldly communists, 
such as the 19th century utopians, have ever believed in total abolition 
of private property.  In the real world, socialists and communists
alike have laws against theft.  Thus, whether we are capitalist or socialist 
(or some mixture), we all have to try to come to terms with this new 
kind of property.