> How about if you promised not to do that in your acceptance of the license agreement?
I could do that, and then the ethical burden would fall on me to motivate why society would benefit more from my use of the software than it would benefit everyone I would potentially deny to receive a copy of it.
But, the way you phrase it (“claim on the fruits of the software authors labor”) presupposes that it is property, and a rivalrous one at that. However, software is a non-rivalrous good, and whether it should be considered property is the question we are debating.
A club good is simply an excludable non-rivalrous good. In this Internet age it is increasingly hard to maintain the illusion of the excludability of bits.
It is relatively effective. Most people don't pirate things because it's illegal. Especially corporations are less likely to pirate software because of the serious legal consequences.
Note that I said bits, not only software. Most everyone has their music collection. Also, in regards to software, show me an average person who hasn’t had a pirated version of, say, Photoshop or MS Office. Even in business office settings it is, I am given to understand, very common.
Also, does a mere legal barrier suffice to make something an excludable good? Could you turn, for example, the observing of the Statue of Liberty into an excludable good merely by passing a law mandating that only those allowed may observe it?
I could do that, and then the ethical burden would fall on me to motivate why society would benefit more from my use of the software than it would benefit everyone I would potentially deny to receive a copy of it.
But, the way you phrase it (“claim on the fruits of the software authors labor”) presupposes that it is property, and a rivalrous one at that. However, software is a non-rivalrous good, and whether it should be considered property is the question we are debating.