THOMPSON@USC-ECLC.ARPA (04/09/84)
From: mark thompson <THOMPSON@USC-ECLC.ARPA> Well, i was going to skip tonight's bonfire, but what the hey...you can only get burned. For the sake of argument, lets say that a morality is 'workable' if you could successfully operate a society where everyone followed that morality. Clearly, if your actions fail this test, you have a double- standard somewhere. Now what happens where you have a user community that cheerfully steals any software they happen to need? Well, the producers try to copy-protect it (i bet the record industry would love to copy-protect records!), which makes it harder to use; then they either raise the price (to recover their expenses over fewer copies) or make the stuff cheaper to produce (and usually worse to use); finally, a lot of them give up. Conclusion: you can steal the stuff, and they cant stop you. However, any moral justifications you have come up with are horse manure, so stop kidding yourself. -mark <THOMPSON@USC-ECLC.ARPA> -------