Yeah, but no. If I want to make a home or specialty video and give it away to a few folks but not sell it, that doesn't give you any kind of moral right to take it and give it to the world. And it certainly shouldn't give you the legal right. In your version of reality everything produced by anyone should be available to all comers and if you don't charge for it then they'll give it away for free? What about bloody confidential documents or video of my groundbreaking experiments? I think you need to rethink that. If someone genuinely doesn't want to sell you their film anymore well, then, bugger off.
Yeah, but no. If I want to make a home or specialty video and give it away to a few folks but not sell it, that doesn't give you any kind of moral right to take it and give it to the world.
I can't take it. If, however, one of those persons you shared your video with decides to share it with me (or the rest of the world), you can't do shit, to put it bluntly.
To explain it differently, there are two states some piece of media (be it movie, music, books or software) can be in: Private, and public (and to those savvy C++ programmers amongst us, no, there is no "protected" :) ). As long as it is private, indeed no one has a right to gain access to it. In your example, the video would still be private as long as no one you showed / gave it to decides to share it with other people (ie, the rest of the world).
Once someone decides to share it, it is no longer private. It's public. And just as much as no one has a right to demand access to something private, no one (not even you, as the original creator) has a right to stop people from sharing something if they had access to it, thus no longer making it private.
To put this in perspective for the music and movie industry, as well as software authors and writers: there is but one (very simple) way of controlling your creation: don't share it with anyone else. Either that, or publish it, accepting the consequences that come with that decision, one being that you cannot stop people from sharing your creation.
tl;dr: I can't demand access from you, but neither can you demand me to stop sharing once I have.
I hope you're never interested in a job in commercial software - it's be very hard for many of these firms to stay in business if every disgruntled committer was legally clear to leak your whole source code base to the competition or the world.
So, it amounts to firms relying on laws for their business model? Or, more accurately, the artificial monopolies created by said laws? That's doing it wrong. If you cannot stay in business without these laws, you shouldn't be in business in the first place.
Oh, and no, I'm not in the least tiny bit interested in developing proprietary software. :)
Very true, but what it this law only applied to very openly sold works? Let's say for sake of argument only ones that had sold a million copies. Once it's put there it's out there and it's really a shame when thrice-transferred IP from a defunct company can't be bought any more.
