> Those ones and zeroes belong to the company and you have to pay the company to get a copy of the ones and zeroes.
They certainly own the ones and zeroes on their own hard drives, but they don't suddenly own the bits on my hard drive if they happen to fall into the same arrangement.
What I always resort to arguing is that ideas and creative works are not property and it doesn't make sense to apply property rights to them. Think back to why physical theft is immoral: it's not because the owner put time and effort into making or earning the property, it's because you can't take the property without depriving the owner of it. That isn't the case for an arrangement of bits on a hard drive, and that's why I don't think copying is immoral.
> If you are going with your argument, any company that makes software should only be able to sell that software once and after that, anyone should be able to copy it.
Any company that relies on selling something that can be effortlessly copied and obtained for free on the Internet, and then lobbies the government to create and enforce increasingly strict rules specifically designed to prop up your business model that is not profitable on its own, does not have any "right" to profit. Note that this is not a dismissal of software-for-profit: there are plenty of profitable software companies that either avoid piracy by providing non-copyable value or by thriving despite piracy.
They certainly own the ones and zeroes on their own hard drives, but they don't suddenly own the bits on my hard drive if they happen to fall into the same arrangement.
What I always resort to arguing is that ideas and creative works are not property and it doesn't make sense to apply property rights to them. Think back to why physical theft is immoral: it's not because the owner put time and effort into making or earning the property, it's because you can't take the property without depriving the owner of it. That isn't the case for an arrangement of bits on a hard drive, and that's why I don't think copying is immoral.
> If you are going with your argument, any company that makes software should only be able to sell that software once and after that, anyone should be able to copy it.
Any company that relies on selling something that can be effortlessly copied and obtained for free on the Internet, and then lobbies the government to create and enforce increasingly strict rules specifically designed to prop up your business model that is not profitable on its own, does not have any "right" to profit. Note that this is not a dismissal of software-for-profit: there are plenty of profitable software companies that either avoid piracy by providing non-copyable value or by thriving despite piracy.