Jim Choate
Judging by the state of software-piracy with PC software with 80-90%+ piracy rates, the market is already pretty much ok with ignoring copyright, and would be happy to have no copyrights.
So long as it isn't money your taking out of their pocket. There is an obvious double standard at play in the piracy issue.
Personally I get paid pretty well for writing software that's given away for free. Why? Because it sells our hardware, and hardware is much, much harder to copy than software (not to mention that the vast majority of sales are made in the first two or three months after releasing a new chip when a cloner would still be trying to get their silicon up and running). OTOH I just paid good money for a Linux CD. Why, when it's all free on the Web? Because it contains a full consistent set of software, ready compiled, and the time I'd spend hunting down all those packages by myself is far more valuable than the cost of the CD. The same could be said to apply to many of the other software packages I've bought in the past; yes, in theory I could copy them, but I don't know anyone who has a copy, so it would take longer to hunt it down for free than to pay for it up front. Software copyright really only benefits big companies like Microsoft. There are good reasons for buying software from other companies even if there was no copyright enforcement at gunpoint. Mark