Correct. Artificial scarcity is immoral, we need to move to a system where it's not necessary to restrict people from having access to something that has a real cost approaching zero in order to collect rents.

SaaS is a perversion created by a system that cannot separate value from scarcity even though the reality is that software is infinitely replicable.

Yes. It's the 21st century, artificial scarcity no longer makes any sense. Globally networked computers exist and they trivially render any information abundant at negligible costs.

People need new business models. Selling bits doesn't work. Attempting to make it work requires the destruction of free computing as we know it.

> Globally networked computers exist and they trivially render any information abundant at negligible costs

So you'll be okay with me photocopying a printed book you published and giving it away for free, because "trivially" is a relative term, and I can certainly "trivially" reproduce your book a million times (compared to 12th century monks copying holy works by hand)?

> Attempting to make it work requires the destruction of free computing as we know it

And I suppose copyrighted printed books (and poems, and song lyrics) destroyed "free press" as we know it?

> So you'll be okay with me

Yes.

> And I suppose copyrighted printed books (and poems, and song lyrics) destroyed "free press" as we know it?

That's not what I was talking about. The destruction of free computing will come about due to copyright enforcement and the technology necessary for its implementation.

Copying is a fundamental computer operation. If I'm in control of the computer, I can make it copy anything including copyrighted works and there's nothing they can do about it. So how do you prevent people from copying whatever they want? You take control of the computer.

This is our reality today. This is their solution to the "allow them to run all programs except those we don't like" problem. Our computers are already pwned right out of the factory. They have inaccessible memory, secure enclaves, ring -3 operating systems overseeing everything, cryptographic checks to ensure the corporation's system hasn't been "tampered with", the works. Apple computers have cryptography that prevents you from running software not blessed by trillion dollar corporations.

With this technology in place, our computing freedom is gone. We can no longer do what we want, only what they allow. It's gonna get way worse. One day we're going to need government signatures to run software because democratized cryptography undermines their authority and is too subversive to be allowed for the common citizen.

I think computers are among the most important inventions of mankind and far too valuable to sacrifice for the sake of irrelevant business models from centuries ago. One would think other Hacker News users would understand and agree since the copyright industry works every day to undermine and destroy everything that's dear to us.

Derailed discussion. We're talking about what should be legal, not what should be permitted by silicon. I'm not interested in debating this, other, topic.