Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Rykion We live in an information age. Many people's livelihoods are completely based on being paid to create and/or spread information. This group includes teachers, authors, artists, musicians, doctors, accountants, programmers, analysts, and other specialists. Obviously, they shouldn't be paid because knowledge should be free. |
Absolutely, knowledge should be free! Anything else creates a caste system where people with money have knowledge and people without knowledge do not.
I AM a teacher. I get paid to spread knowledge. The knowledge I spread is paid for by the general public, not the recipients of the knowledge. The public has chosen to pay taxes to support the spread of knowledge, not the knowledge itself.
What if student goes home and makes a "copy" of the knowledge he learned by teaching it to his parent? That's a good thing!
Knowledge itself is free, but there needs to be an incentive for people to create or spread it. If the public stopped paying teachers, then we wouldn't teach. If the public stopped buying RPG books, then there would be no more RPGs!
The moral choice is not in "copying" knowledge, but rather in choosing to support the cost that is needed to have created it. Not everybody is going to pay for the knowledge that they've obtained, but they don't have to. Of all the people who will benefit from a knowledge or art, it only takes a much smaller portion of people to have supported its creation.
And yet another word from our sponsors
