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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Heard" data-source="post: 1558330" data-attributes="member: 7280">In any case, just because the law says something is such doesn't automatically make an ethical or logical argument that makes sense. People interpret and disobey laws that don't make sense to them all the time, and are in fact somewhat encouraged to do so by our culture. Regardless of some misappropriated legalism or rabid assertions by the people who assert that they've been victimized, until some sort of compromise or police state powers are suddenly granted to destroy what fair use and IP ownership rights of a consumer there's going to be a major and catastrophic disconnect. I mean, you can say that some students in a college have somehow cause several billion dollars in damages by dissimenating illegal copies of IP and even produce a settlement to the effect of 'winning' the debate. You're not connecting that with your consumer though, anymore than the gentleman who committed the felony in his pursuit of tracking his IP being infringed. You simply can't conduct business by outlining your customer base as criminals, potential criminals, and criminals who were cowed by your ability to sue them into homelessness. Even if those are your actual assumptions, and perhaps even the truth of the matter, you can't maintain a good relationship with people buying a luxury item that depends on their goodwill and your branding. Branding yourself as "a set of lawyers with no interest in the public domain" or "willing to overstep the bounds of the law in acts of vigilantism" doesn't put a consumer into a stance of goodwill with your product anymore than shop owners who beat shoplifters to death in full view of the other customers (even if they had the full support of the law behind their actions). Add in the fact that major IP and copyright issues are probably only lobbied for by the people with the most funding and stake in the matter (there's no hundreds of billion dollars cartel defending the public domain and fair use) and it's no wonder that there's chaos.For me, whatever legal arguments made must be weighed against the responsibility to enhancing the public domain and not the IP owner/creator. Whatever expectations of profit you wish to assign to the monopoly of copyright must always be first weighed against the profit of the public who grant that monopoly. That responsibility is being severely abused and misinterpreted currently, in my opinion. It has led to guilds that were the very institutions that copyright was created to remove, and a sense of property and ownership where Jefferson clearly didn't intend.</blockquote>

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