Is it fair that computer programs can be copied without additional work, while other tangibles cannot?

Question

Is it fair that computer programs can be copied without additional work, while other tangibles cannot?

Yet they are all sold in the same markets in exchange to the same currency?

Answer 1

There are many things that are difficult and costly to make, but easy to copy. Computer programs are one, but the same is true of books, musical recordings, artwork, photographs, films, etc. There is some cost in copying a book, to be sure, but that is tiny compared with the cost of creating it. The cost to print a book is typically less than a tenth of the purchase price. And of course with digital versions, the copying is just as easy as it is with programs.

If you are asking, how is the easy copying of digital content fair to the creator, then the most common way of addressing this issue in modern societies is through intellectual property rights. If you create a program, write a book, make some music, paint a picture, take a photograph, etc., then you own the copyright on it and you can make money by charging a royalty. Some people will makes copies and not pay, but usually enough people are willing to pay that the owner is sufficiently compensated.

If you are asking, how is the easy copying of digital content fair to the consumer, then the answer is, How is any price fair? The price emerges at the point where supply and demand intersect. If the owner charges too much, consumers won't buy and other creators will be motivated to compete. In the case of computer software, there are nearly always inexpensive alternatives if you don't wish to pay for the leading products. Bear in mind also that with computer software there are typically considerable ongoing costs for development of future versions, customer support, bug fixing, porting to different platforms, marketing, etc., so it is never the case that software production is free after the initial development cost.

Answer 2

The entire capitalist market system isn't fair to begin with. It's essentially about gatekeeping crucial resources so that you can manipulate the price. Because if the demand is fixed (hence crucial resources) and you are the major supplier, you can essentially dictate the price.

Now does it generate a value? Does it do something good for humanity or whatnot if you gatekeep resources and create artificial bottlenecks for something? No of course not. In fact you probably wasted time, money and resources to make people worse of than they were before and whatever benefit you reap for yourself is likely less than the accumulated utility that you've wasted for other people.

Now if the resource is really scarce and in high demand you've essentially got society in a stranglehold of economic power. At which point they'd either get enslaved by you, rebel against you or attempt ways to circumvent you. Proponents of this system hope that people will always be effective at circumventing those strangleholds through "innovation" and/or that those with the stranglehold will allow for or even encourage innovation because ... idk they are benevolent, bored with power or otherwise interested in progress for it's own sake more than in sadism. Making it some hamster wheel where the names and faces might change, but the distribution of the stranglers to the strangled remains largely the same.

So in that regard demanding high prices for something that you can produce, at high quantities, for much cheaper, is essentially just another artificial bottleneck in order to make money through gatekeeping.

Essentially you've got the calculation of "how much does it cost to buy that" vs "how long will it take me to do it myself". So if the programmer demands idk the equivalent of 33 work hours for their program and you don't think you can learn their skills (and produce the same outcome) in that amount of time you might rather hire a professional regardless of how hard or easy it is for them. If you do that over and over again it might have on the other hand paid to learn the skills yourself. However if you're busy making money to hire professionals you've got no time left to become a professional, meaning you're kind of dependent on these people.

So the value of your labor isn't determined by how hard it is or how much effort you put into it or whatnot but by supply and demand. Is what you're doing so easy that everyone can and does do it if they've nothing better to do? Well bad luck for you. Is it something that takes a lot of time to master and is in high demand? Well you're lucky. Is it something that takes a lot of time to master and is not in demand... Bad luck. Is it something that is actually easy but people haven't realized that yet? Well you're lucky. And so on. Is any of that fair. Well for the most part no. Some might say it is because it probably took some time and effort to master something, but that doesn't mean much and it might take as much or more effort to perform a low paying job.

So there's apparently a whole "industry" of people hiring other people to make their job look hard and then reap millions and billions for doing it. Bonus points if it's something you can scale and distribute to lots of people at no additional cost.

Is that fair? Well if you have the impression that people should produce a value for themselves and each other and make things better instead of just filling their pockets in a predatory way. Well then probably no. If you think it's a shark tank and you just want to be another shark, well you might think it is as it's not really different from what everyone else is doing or attempting to do.

Does it have to be like this? Well kinda and kinda not. Like we are individuals and have our individual wants and needs so there is some tendency to take up those positions of strangling others and/or likely end up being strangled, if the situation is dire we might not even have much of a choice. At the same time it's usually a position which is in conflict with ethics and morality (most of them). And the conflict from it might even turn that balance to the negative. And we are aware of that problem.

So if you look at it cooperatively and consider a fictional collective workload to keep society running than being able to distribute skills at little additional cost is awesome. Though it creates work at the end of the consumer to do something useful with that information. Learning is also work. Yet it's usually worth it and the better the available material the more efficient the process, maybe.

However if you look at it competitively then gatekeeping is beneficial to the individual and you're kinda encouraged to gatekeep, copy or otherwise repurpose material and to extend the tutoring phase for as long as you can in order to milk that cow. And it might even be necessary as they also need to look at their bottom line.

Either way the exchange is not fair and it's quite hard, possibly even impossible to be actually fair and not just dependent on supply end demand or in other words strangleholds over other people due to gatekeeping crucial resources.

Answer 3

Is it fair that computer programs can be copied without additional work, while other tangibles cannot?

Programs are simply a set of instructions. So copying the blueprints for a building is a more appropriate comparison than the actual construction of two identical buildings.

Answer 4

You are not buying the program per se. You are buying a license that gives you a legal right to use the program. This is similar to renting tangibles like a car, a book, or a place to live. You basically never "own" software, the owner is always the copyright holder, who gets to decide under what terms they license the software.

Keep in mind some software is very expensive to create.

Answer 5

From a physics standpoint, copying information i.e., digital data fundamentally requires the expenditure of work.

From an engineering standpoint, the machinery needed to copy digital data inevitably consumes electrical power.

From a practical standpoint, transferring digital data to an end user requires only a tiny fraction of the energy needed to assemble the object, put it into a box, drive it to its destination in a truck and hand it to the customer.