[free-sklyarov] Arguments from consumer rights pov

[Austin Hook]

On Wed, 25 Jul 2001, Christopher R. Maden wrote:
> >may further take away more fractions of your potential sale value.  Of
> >course, if I had no intention whatsoever to buy it from you in the first
> >place, and I do not intend to distribute it to others, then you lose nothing
> >letting me copy it.
> 
> This last point isn't *quite* true.  Even if you didn't intend to buy it, 
> there are two damages caused by your copying.  One is that the perceived 
> value of a scarce resource is lowered; people place a value on having 
> something that not everyone else has (such as limited editions) or on being 
> able to own things that have a high cost of entry.  

Think again.  That might be true with stamps or antique cars, but they are
special cases.  So far there is not much of a collector's market in old
software.  And that's the only kind of market that exhibits that kind of
value system.  With software, it's almost always the exact reverse.  The
more people that have it, the more the other guys want it.  Keeping up
with the Joneses and all.  That's why software piracy often helps more
than it hurts, or because of the pluses and minuses is often neutral.

It is not the normal case of a scarce resource, like water or energy,
except as artificially constrained.  Like food in the world to day.  One
of the great crimes is that every where are supluses, except where the
people are starving to death.

Austin Hook
Calgary