It makes me nervous when the term natural rights is thrown around with elan and vigour. The documents that created this country ensured natural, inalienable rights. Natural rights are not to be killed, tortured, not to starve, not to be robbed. To excerise free speech, to vote, to bear arms. We do not have a natural right to do whatever we want with what we pay money for. We do not have the right to infringe on others natural rights (ie to be robbed) with the goods that we buy. And that means we do not have the right to infringe on copyright just because we bought the program, or the music, or the movie. Because the people who worked their asses off to produce that good deserve to have the benefits of that good, and if they do not wish to give us the right to distribute, then the right is not ours. Its not a natural right to commit theft. If we as part of an open source community wish to distribute each other's work, that's sharing and disseminating with permission. That's free speech. There is a difference. We can't use our beliefs in open source to infringe on the rights of those who don't. That's our natural responsibility as members of a society. It's not pretty, or nice, or convenient, but its true, and we have to live with that.
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It makes me nervous when the term natural rights is thrown around with elan and vigour. The documents that created this country ensured natural, inalienable rights. Natural rights are not to be killed, tortured, not to starve, not to be robbed. To excerise free speech, to vote, to bear arms. We do not have a natural right to do whatever we want with what we pay money for. We do not have the right to infringe on others natural rights (ie to be robbed) with the goods that we buy. And that means we do not have the right to infringe on copyright just because we bought the program, or the music, or the movie. Because the people who worked their asses off to produce that good deserve to have the benefits of that good, and if they do not wish to give us the right to distribute, then the right is not ours. Its not a natural right to commit theft. If we as part of an open source community wish to distribute each other's work, that's sharing and disseminating with permission. That's free speech. There is a difference. We can't use our beliefs in open source to infringe on the rights of those who don't. That's our natural responsibility as members of a society. It's not pretty, or nice, or convenient, but its true, and we have to live with that.