alt Hacker NewsYou can only use each barrel of oil once, so it is not remotely the same thing. It's like torrenting a movie vs stealing someone's car. My labor has been compensated and nothing has been extracted.
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ajam1507 • yesterday at 4:39 PM
How is an author fairly compensated when you torrent their book? Should we just stop paying for media because it's infinitely reproducible?
Nothing physical is being stolen when a company makes a clone of a product based on another company's designs, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have patent laws.
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Fair point, data isn't scarce like oil. Nobody's losing their forum posts. That part of my analogy is weak.
But you're answering a question I'm not asking. The question isn't "was something taken from you." It's "who deserves a share when collective human output generates trillions in commercial value."
your torrenting analogy makes my case. Nobody loses their original movie when it gets pirated either. We still recognize that the people who made it deserve compensation when others profit from it. The entire IP enforcement apparatus is built on exactly that principle.
Non-rivalrous doesn't mean non-exploitable.