Back in 2005, way before Huawei was known as a smartphone manufacturer, I was working at an R&D office focused on phone networks in Brazil.
I went to a meeting with one of our clients that was just signing with us. The main reason that he was contracting with us was, I quote, "the last time we went to China we found a Huawei rep making a demo of an application that worked exactly like ours - which was meant to run on Cisco gear. Even the terminal escape sequences to get to debugging mode was the same. The Chinese were stealing from us and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it."
Copyright law might be enough of a deterrent to make Joe Nobody pay $9.99 to Netflix instead of torrenting movies, and (on occasion) it may be enough to force some high-profile artist to give credit to some other lesser known musician who "served as inspiration". Outside of that, copyright law is as effective to "stop bad actors" as the "War on Drugs" is effective to stop organized crime and drug trafficking.
Copyright laws rely on enforcement, which China couldn't give a rat's ass about. Brazil, however, clearly does, and your employer at the time earned a new client
because of copyright laws that will hopefully protect the client.
If that was true, people in Brazil wouldn't be pirating movies as much as they do, and there wouldn't be computer shops in downtown São Paulo selling cracked copies of Windows to small/medium business like they still do.
Can you please stop with the "so you are saying that..."? Not only is a poor form of conversation, it makes you look like you are being dishonest or an idiot. Or both.
Let me spell it out: I think that the cost of trying to police "copyright violations" far outweighs any of the potential losses and damages that might be incurred for losing such "protections". This is not the case for murder. The cost of life is incalculable, so any measures to prevent loss of life is justifiable.
Laws that try to protect citizens from physical harm and are meant to preserve human life are of a completely different nature than "copyright violation". It's perfectly reasonable to argue for decriminalization of copyright infringement without having to accept that anything should be decriminalized.
To go further: I see no moral justification to have copyright infringement as a violation worthy of criminal persecution. I believe that "intellectual property" is a misnomer and I think that any type of current laws are meant only to protect large corporations and are not made with the best interests of society in general.
Is that enough for you, or are you going to continue pushing false slippery slopes?
> Is that enough for you, or are you going to continue pushing false slippery slopes?
You misunderstood. I was not trying to portray your argument as a slippery slope. I was trying to portray your argument as just generally weak, which it obviously was ("but china" is not even an argument). Given that you completely misunderstood my point, the rest of your comment doesn't even apply.
That you had to resort to subtly calling me an idiot says a lot.
My anecdote about Huawei "stealing IP" was just that, an anecdote. It was meant as a counterpoint against your "copyright stops bad actors", not as the basis of an argument against copyright in itself.
> That you had to resort to subtly calling me an idiot says a lot.
That you didn't mind me subtly calling you dishonest says even more, and shows that I'm done here.
Yes it does.