Something Eloquent

Lindsay has been doing a lot of read­ing lately about pla­gi­ar­ism. It’s a ser­i­ous con­cern for artists I would ima­gine. Perhaps my views on soft­ware pir­acy relate here, people jus­tify soft­ware theft by say­ing that it’s just 1’s and 0’s on the Internet. Well a book is just ink stains on paper, should I be allowed to scan a best selling novel and sell it for my own profit? A paint­ing is just pig­ment on a medium, can I copy Pablo Picasso’s work and sell it as my own?

Computers are a strange beast. They con­tain so much stuff, but there’s really noth­ing about that stuff which can be iden­ti­fied or dif­fer­en­ti­ated from the com­puter its self. So when I install a pro­gram on my com­puter it essen­tially becomes a part of the defin­ing char­ac­ter­ist­ics of “my com­puter”. This is why pro­pri­et­ary soft­ware com­pan­ies deliver an End User License Agreement (EULA) with the soft­ware. Almost every EULA says essen­tially that you don’t own the soft­ware that you’ve just pur­chased, you only have the right to use this soft­ware in a spe­cific way.

That may be a part of the prob­lem with Software and Piracy. EULA’s aren’t neces­sar­ily recog­nized as bind­ing, and cer­tainly not on a global level. I’m sure if the logist­ics could be sor­ted out we would have to sign a proper con­tract before buy­ing any new pro­grams for our com­puters. Software developers don’t really have much in the way of legal pro­tec­tion yet for the tools that they work very hard to pro­duce, so instead we get Digital Rights Management (DRM) and watch­dog groups like the Business Software Alliance (BSA).

It’s too bad that people think that they deserve some­thing for noth­ing, but they do. Until a time when people can be trus­ted not to steal, there will always need to be people will­ing to help pre­vent theft and organ­iz­a­tions that can help report it.