Sharing is caring?

Sharing is caring?




As a kid, im sure as most of you, I was taught to share. Share my toys, my room, sometimes my food, but share.

As an adult, sharing is not quite so simple. You may, for example, buy a lawnmower, and share it with your neighbor. You can even tell you neighbor at that point, “Hey, and go ahead and share my lawnmower with anyone else you want! And that they can share it with anyone too!”. You still have not broken any laws.
But let’s say you buy a dvd. Then you go online and share it with your neighbor. And then you tell him “Hey, share the shit out of this!”. You are in trouble mister… big trouble…

So my question is, where do we draw the lines? How can we tell grown adults that sharing of certain owned property is prohibited, but others ok. How do we decide what is ok? Of course we would like to preach the message of “Hey, do not share needles! ), but still that would be up to the individual people involved right?
What if we just prohibit the sharing of things that are illegal, the obvious. No sharing of nuclear weapons and child porn, things like that. Dvds are not illegal, however, or music cds or video games nor computer software.

Chime in!

There are literally laws about this subject. That's probably a good starting point for this discussion. They mostly exist because artists (in general) don't get enough monetary compensation for their work, and sharing that work without paying for it literally takes food out of my mouth.

Marc wrote: Sharing is caring?




As a kid, im sure as most of you, I was taught to share. Share my toys, my room, sometimes my food, but share.

As an adult, sharing is not quite so simple. You may, for example, buy a lawnmower, and share it with your neighbor. You can even tell you neighbor at that point, “Hey, and go ahead and share my lawnmower with anyone else you want! And that they can share it with anyone too!”. You still have not broken any laws.
But let’s say you buy a dvd. Then you go online and share it with your neighbor. And then you tell him “Hey, share the shit out of this!”. You are in trouble mister… big trouble…

So my question is, where do we draw the lines? How can we tell grown adults that sharing of certain owned property is prohibited, but others ok. How do we decide what is ok? Of course we would like to preach the message of “Hey, do not share needles! ), but still that would be up to the individual people involved right?
What if we just prohibit the sharing of things that are illegal, the obvious. No sharing of nuclear weapons and child porn, things like that. Dvds are not illegal, however, or music cds or video games nor computer software.

Chime in!

The DVD thing used to be a consumer right. Unfortunately people who make DVDs have a lot more greed and a more powerful lobby group than lawnmower manufacturers. Can you imagine if everytime you use your lawnmower it first forced you to hear a warning about how you shouldn't steal lawnmowers? This is why people torrent movies but not lawnmowers. :whistle:

What about public libraries? How does it get decided which books go to public libraries and which you still need to pay for at a book store?

One of the things I miss the most in the US is being able to go to a public library and read for hours, even checkout books to take home.

The difference is that when you lend your neighbor your lawn mower you don't have it anymore. There's still only the one lawn mower out there. When you torrent a movie or a song online there are now multiple copies of it in the hands of multiple people when only one was paid for. It's not illegal to give your friend the physical disk but it is illegal to torrent it. That's not all there is to it, of course.

Libraries make you bring the stuff back. It's more like the lawn mower. They pay for the book and then let other people read them and bring them back. If you don't they charge you for it so they can buy another one. Each copy has been paid for.

...dwarfs..

..and jedi.

RA Salvatore (or maybe just his publisher) owns the rights to Bruenor Battlehammer, but they dont own the idea of dwarfs

someone came up with the idea of dwarfs so far back that its impossible to say who, which is great for Culture because it means we all get to enjoy awesome stories about bad-ass dwarfs who ride into battle on warthogs and jump on the backs of evil dragons

so dwarfs themselves belong now to CULTURE itself, but this was only able to happen because they were created before copyright laws

which leads to snow white and the seven dwarfs

disney now owns the name "snow white" - even though the brothers grimm published the first snow white story in the 1800s and even though the bros didnt invent snow white either - it was a folk tale passed down from generation to generation for - who knows? a long time

i dont see disney dying any time soon: we now live in an era where it is possible for major corporate entities such as disney to exist as long as civilization continues

so where does that leave Jedi?

Jedi are a class of character that has a huge impact on culture, (OBVIOUSLY lol) and i dont think anyone here will deny that the whole human race can benefit from people in general having freedom in using the jedi idea, even if we cant use skywalker or vader

but will jedi ever be open to cultural use the way that dwarfs are?