Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!novavax!twwells!bill
From: bill@twwells.uucp (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: New Communicational Morality (piracy)
Keywords: software, copyright, society, piracy, sleeze
Message-ID: <846@twwells.uucp>
Date: 23 Apr 89 08:24:53 GMT
References: <754@infovax.lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de> <3687@ficc.uu.net> <564@corpane.UUCP>
Reply-To: bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells)
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In article <564@corpane.UUCP> sparks@corpane.UUCP (John Sparks) writes:
: So don't put down FD software. It's distribution may be smaller, but the
: quality is there. The distribution is a property of the bucks the commercial
: company puts into the 3 points (mostly number 1) above, not because it's
: copyrighted. Many freely distributed software is copyrighted also.

Note, however, that if the companies couldn't protect their software
they'd not put their money into distribution. Thus it is still the
case that copyrighting the software (and other means of protecting
one's software) is essential to the wide distribution of commercial
software. And so, the original conclusion stands: protection of
software leads to greater distribution of software.

(Get that damned invisible hand out of here. Out! OUT!  O.U.T.! :-)

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Bill                            { uunet | novavax } !twwells!bill