How to Steal Software
How can you steal software easily?
Trick question! You can’t steal software at all.
Stealing is wrong because it deprives the original owner. If I steal your laptop, you have no laptop. If I copy the software from your laptop to my laptop, you still have software on your laptop.
This is unlicensed copying. Not stealing.
This might seem a bit medieval; Since the emergence of the printing press in Italy, publishers have tried to call unlicensed copying “stealing” and equate it to “pirates”, nasty psychos who attack ships. This went away when publishers got laws to stop unlicensed publishers from running their expensive printing presses. Those presses enabled paper money, title deeds, letters of credit, and other “abstract financial instruments” that caused to move European culture from feudal principalities to capitalist democracies.
And the stink about “pirates” went away, because publishers got their laws which traded the publics right to share - which they couldn’t make use of - for publishing monopolies that were meant to quickly expire. The time to expiry got longer and longer, and the public couldn’t copy things, until electric technology came along.
Marshall McLuhan wrote the book on the cultural transition that follows the technological transition from mechanic to electric media, before anyone really noticed it was happening. I think he understand the effects of new technology as much as is possible, and encouraged us to strive to not let the familiar perceptions of old media warp our perceptions of new media.
“Abstract financial instruments” are tokens for “non-abstract financial instruments” otherwise known as ‘assets’: bars of rare metal, patches of land, more bars of metal, that kind of thing. (I believe they’re called ‘assets’, please correct me if you know the correct term)
Copies of them are fraudulent tokens; the owner of a legitimate token can be deprived of what the token represents by them.
Software, both as functional code and as ‘whats-not-hardware’ inert data, is a different kind of thing to things that existed before computers. It is not a token for something else; it is its own thing. A copy cannot be fraudulently exchanged, and so unlicensed copying can not be “stealing”.
Free Software, in contrast, is always ‘licensed copying’, and it is always much better to use Free Software instead of unlicensed non-free software. (I note that Richard Stallman uses the phrase “unauthorised copying”; please let me know if there are problems in my choice of “unlicensed copying”)
Richard Stallman explains why in a recent speech at the Chicago LUG which I have transcribed:
00:03:05 Freedom number 2, the freedom to help your neighbour, the freedom to make copies and redistribute them to others when you wish, up to and including republication, is essential on basic moral grounds so that you can live an upright life as a good member of your community. If you use a program that does not give you this freedom then you are in danger of falling at any moment into a moral dilemma. Whenever your friend says, “That program is nice, can I have a copy?”, at that moment you will be confronted with a choice between two evils. One evil is to give your friend a copy and violate the license of the program. The other evil is to deny your friend a copy and comply with the license of the program. Being in the dilemma, you should chose the lesser evil. The lesser evil is to give your friend a copy, and violate the license. What makes this evil, a lesser evil? Well, if you are in a situation that you cant help wronging somebody, better to do chose somebody who has done wrong, and deserves it. Like the developer of a program who has deliberately attached the social solidarity of your community. Whereas we can assume that your friend is a good member of the community, is a real friend, and normally you want to cooperate with that person. There is another possibility, that he is not a true good friend, and doesn’t help other people, but thats an easy case, you just say to him, “Why should I help you?”. Right, so that case can be disposed of, and it leads to the other case. A hard case, where he is a good guy and member of your community and the kind of person you _should_ help. So helping your friend is the lesser evil. But that doesn’t make it good. Its never a good thing to make an agreement and then break it. Some agreements are inherently evil, and its better to break them than to keep them. But its still not really good. And the other thing is that if you do give your friend a copy, that will be an unauthorised copy of a proprietary program. And thats a pretty bad thing. Its almost as bad an an authorised copy of a proprietary program. So once you have thought this through, and really understood the meaning of this dilemma, what you should really do, is make sure you never are in it. There are two ways to do that. One is, don’t have any friends. Thats the method that proprietary software developers suggest. And the other method is, don’t use the proprietary software. If you don’t have this proprietary program, then you don’t face the dilemma of what to do when someone asks you for a copy. So thats the method I’ve chosen. If someone offers me a program, no matter how under the condition that I promise not to share it with you, then no matter how appealing it is, in a shallow practical sense, I will reject it. I will not betray my social solidarity, the social solidarity of my community. Its my duty, to refuse such offers. 00:07:08 The most important resource of any society…
In addition to the above, theres are a couple of quotes by Richard, about Napster, that are related to this topic:
Q: What kind of a position do you take on applications such as Napster? RMS: Napster is bad because it is proprietary software, but I see nothing unethical in the job it does. Why shouldn’t you send a copy of some music to a friend? I don’t play music from files on my computer, but I’ve occasionally made tapes of records and given them to my friends.
Before Napster, I thought it might be OK for people to privately redistribute works of entertainment,” Stallman says. “The number of people who find Napster useful, however, tells me that the right to redistribute copies not only on a neighbor-to-neighbor basis, but to the public at large, is essential and therefore may not be taken away.
The How to Steal Software by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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