[OT] - does IP exist?

[Lars Ivar Igesund]

This thread has been all about works that are meant for sale, books, music,
software. Someone makes the assertion that they have a right to copy.
Consider this case;

You write a highly poetic and very private piece in an email to your wife.
In fact it is so good that if presented in a book, you could make good
money out of it. But still, it is very private, and you have no itention of
showing it to anyone but your wife. Do others still have a right to copy
this if they inadvertently came over it?

If the answer to the latter question is yes, then you also accept that
anyone have the right to read and know everything written by others,
including dictatorial governments towards their political counterparts.

I assert that the intention of keeping a private letter away from other's
eye is no different than the intention of keeping the work private unless
someone pays for it.

If you disagree with this, you should also think it is ok by your government
to pry on your private information. If you don't think this is ok, but
still disagree with me, then you have met yourself in the door.

As a person with morals and ethics, you should always honor the authors
intentions (the exception could be (and this also normally exists in
current frameworks of law) if the author's reasoning for keeping something
away from the public is the intention to do bad). Unless the author have
explicitly stated the intention is to give the work away for free, you
should honor that he wants to be paid, because you need to make the
assumption that the author needs at least some of those money to live. That
he may earn more if successful is a bonus to him and irrelevant to this
case, because only selling one item (which is also possible) quite surely
will _not_ be enough to give him what he needs. Such cases could be
rectified by the state with enough political will in any case.

If you don't think you have an obligation to honor the author, then I will
claim that you probably are more morally and ethically flawed than you like
to think you are :) I won't claim to be an exception to that group, but I
do try to follow the above suggestion of honoring the authors myself.

Note that I also think that prices on software seems to be very high in many
cases, and I like open source software better than closed source, but I do
not think copying it without the author's consent is the way to solve it.
Buy the cheaper competition, or become the competition. This is what a
modern market place is all about.

-- 
Lars Ivar Igesund
blog at http://larsivi.net
DSource, #d.tango & #D: larsivi
Dancing the Tango