Abolish copyright.

You can charge for material things - paper, ink, packaging material, the time of the workers to prepare it. You can even charge for bandwidth, server upkeep, and electricity. But information has no material cost and therefore cannot be sold.

Exercise civil disobedience: it's your obligiation as a good citizen to be a pirate. We can negotiate again when they change the law to make copyrighted works enter the public domain within our lifetimes.

@sir

> Abolish copyright.

Strong disagree (at least without many other changes)

I release all my software as #foss. I do so because that will let the most people use the code, and (so far) I've been able to make the financials work in a way that keep me writing code.

But I don't beleive anyone has a moral *obligation* to release code in the way that benefits the most people. It's how *I* live up to my values, but others can make there own choices.

(1/2)

@sir

> it's your obligation as a good citizen to… pirate

Strong disagree. Respect others' choices.

I recently bought 4 of @mwlucas's books. Releasing those under a free license would've been great, but he chose not to; presumably, the financials for doing so don't work out (even with patreon/etc).

I'm glad those books exist; copyright allows them to. Huge social changes might get us those books without copyright, but right now "civil disobedience" would just mean doing without them

@codesections @mwlucas in response to your first post, I was going to ask you to respond on the same terms as I levelled my argument - on the intrinsic value of the work.

I would like to point out that there are many business models for which the financials don't work out. It's not always the role of law to step in and restrict the rights of private citizens to enable a certain business model to exist. We also need to improve social support systems so that getting a working business model is never in the way of getting food on your table or a roof over your head - so that you don't have to worry as much about finding a way to turn your passions into profits.

Have you asked @mwlucas if he has tried publishing books under creative commons (which - for the record - does not mean giving them away. You can sell people a CC e-Book or a CC print book) before resorting to copyright?

@sir

> [could you] respond on the same terms as I leveled my argument - on the intrinsic value of the work.

I didn't respond at that level because that level is, bluntly, a bit incoherent.

Items don't have "intrinsic value" —there is no fact about the *item* that determines its value.

There's just people, and what sort of use/enjoyment we get out of the item. SSH Mastery had value to *me*—more value that the $9.99 I paid.

We had this argument in the 1700s, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_value_(economics)