I'm a photographer, and I've encountered people who stole my pictures. Believe me, waking up at 5AM, staying up running around all day to take pictures, to then see some people not even pay the price of a lunch for them is... well, doesn't feel great.
Thankfully that's a minority of people.
What I mean to say is: f*ck people who make such "watermark removal" tools.
Well there's event and event. In my line of event, I sponsor the events so I can be there and sell pictures to the participants. It's just part of life that some people will steal pictures.
Doesn't mean I don't enjoy that work though. After all, I'm out doing the thing I love doing. Otherwise yes, I would have stopped doing it. But you know, tradeoffs :)
It just makes me quite unhappy that some a*hats on the internet would make stealing pictures easier. That's fully unethical work. It's like if I were selling copies of keys to people's homes and saying "but don't you use them to rob people, yo."
It's literally not stealing though. You have been brainwashed. Stealing is a word that refers to taking physical molecules that have been assigned to one person from another, thus depriving that person of those physical molecules. What you are referring to is slavery: you want to exert control over another person in their own home. You want to prevent a person from sharing information to another person peacefully. That is not stealing, that is slavery, and you are trying to be the master. Those are the real physical terms, if you stop and think about it and do the math.
I am not sure if you will understand this—if you are willing to take red pill—as I've found the saying "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it" to be quite accurate.
If your business model depends upon restricting the freedoms of other people, pivot until you have a better business model.
I feel like your comparisons to slavery are an appeal to emotion rather than a rational argument. Can you either expand further on your argument (rather than just stating it as fact) or link to somewhere where you (or someone who represents that point of view well) discusses it further?
I don't buy the "exert control over another person in their home" argument. I'm not sure why laws about information rise to the level of "slavery" in your view. I think even calling digital items simply "information" is a bit of a (likely intentional) misclassification.
I think there are a ton of problems with the way we handle digital materials from a legal standpoint, and I do think vast swaths should be more freely available, and that the length of copyright and other laws are way too long. So I'm sympathetic, to a point. But the argument you make in the above post isn't really convincing, even to me (someone who likely leans closer to your PoV than many here).
> I feel like your comparisons to slavery are an appeal to emotion rather than a rational argument.
Yes, it is an appeal to emotion but it's also rooted in logic. The "intellectual property" lie is also an appeal to emotion (attempting to falsely piggy back on anti-communist sentiment, even though (c)opywrongs and patents are actually anti-property rights) but not rooted in logic.
> Can you either expand further on your argument
If you program a multi-agent simulation of the world and define slaves and masters you'd have:
class Person
class Slave extends Person
askOnDate(recipient)
if (this.master.grantsPermission())
super.askOnDate(recipient)
sendFile(recipient, file)
if (file.master.grantsPermission())
super.sendFile(recipient, file)
class Master extends Person
Someone who has to ask permission of a 3rd party not involved in a transaction is a partial slave.
On New Year's eve I was holding a book in my hand written in 1927 that was someone else's "intellectual property", and when the clock struck midnight magically it wasn't! I'm the one with the unhinged take?
My take is literally the only take grounded in reality.
I will pay you ten thousand dollars if you can come up with a set of axioms that define 1) physical property rights 2) slavery 3) copyright and patent laws, where #3 are #1 but not #2.
There is a LOT of room for improvement on copyright and patent laws, no disagreement. But there is a lot of middle ground between where we are now and no laws at all around copyright/patents. In an increasingly digital society, creators should be able to exercise some level of control over what they create for some (relatively short) period of time.
FWIW, I probably lean slightly closer to your side of the spectrum than most, and even I feel this take is extreme.
> So you disagree with most open source licenses like the GNU GPL, as well as the Creative Commons licenses?
Yes!
I think they are a clever maneuver to weaponize (c)opywrong laws against themselves. But they are short-sighted.
Ultimately the solution is to Amend the Constitution. The idea of "Licenses" on Ideas is repulsive when you think about what that means from root, and the goal should be to get rid of such a concept all together, like we got rid of the concept of Licenses on People. FSF, EFF, and CC should come together and realize this and take a real stand. Go on the offense.
Thankfully that's a minority of people.
What I mean to say is: f*ck people who make such "watermark removal" tools.