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Old 28th May 2009 | Show parent
Lives for gear
colinmiller's Avatar

Do you understand what you are asking for by expecting ownership of someone else's intellectual property? That means that anyone who buys it owns it to do whatever they want. They can then make changes to it, they can then re-sell it. I could buy a copy of a piece of software, own the rights to that, and then start selling as many copies as I want for less money since my development cost is simply the purchase itself, and thus put all the software companies out of business.

So there are different rules because they are different mediums. The equiv in physical propery would be like expecting your purchase to include the entire process to make that physical item. If customers of software companies were to own the software, then there would be no point in any software companies even going into business to begin with. Just like if the same were true for any customer buying a book, there would be no point in anyways becoming a writer, or any company beccoming a publisher, etc.

If I buy something from the store and it breaks. If I lose my receipt, then I am screwed. I paid for the product, which includes the warranty, but without that little piece of paper, my purchase is meaningless. You purchase a software license and you own that liscense for as long as it's terms. But you lose the proof of that liscense and you lose the rights to it, just like with physical property. And like with both, you can take precautions to safeguard it and have backup such as insurance, and getting no-downtime backups.

Sure it's not as conveient as there being no protection what so ever, but what other choice is there? It's inconveneint for me to have to wait in line at the airport and spend more time going through security than most flights themselves. But what choice is there? If they don't, an incident can happen that I won't be involved with, people will be too scared to fly, the airlines lose money and go out of business, and I as a loyal customer am out of luck even though I never did anything wrong myself.

It's certainly not that I don't get what you're saying, just that I don't see any better alternative for myself as a customer who depends on a lot of software plugins to make my living. I don't want someone else's theft to take down a software company who's software I may depend on for my income. And it's a new industry so I am sure over time the methods will improve.