SALE! FL STUDIO All Plugins Edition + FREE Bonus Plugins/Content

[davidneely]

Hi, Scott. Thank you for the reply. I agree that Image Line is very generous with the terms of their license, and that is so appreciated. I hope that this especially creates incentive for more people to support its development.

My comment about copyright was not intended to imply that I believe people should not pay for software. I very much believe they should, not so much because people have an ethical responsibility to do so (although it can be argued that in many cases they do), but because in most cases it is beneficial for both parties to support the development of software.

My opposition to copyright is not because I want free stuff and feel entitled to it, but rather because I do not believe copying of information and sharing it with others in itself is an aggressive act in the way that theft is. When something is stolen, its original owner is deprived of the stolen thing. Copying 0s and 1s and transmitting their sequence over wires so that might be recorded onto another device does not deprive the original "owner" of anything, first because nobody "owns" an alphanumeric sequence, but also because when software (or digital art, or music, or recipes, or formulas for medicine, etc) is copied, the original is not destroyed. I think this distinction is important.

Obviously the view of those who value copyright is that the person who claims rights to distribute the intellectual property (usually granted to its creator, or to some other entity to which those rights are transferred) is deprived of payment for their creative labor, but I believe this reasoning is flawed. Again, I do not mean to imply that I believe they should labor for free, or that people are entitled to the result of it, rather that sharing the software itself is not the thing which is causing harm. If I copied the contents of an author's work and put it on 100 digital storage devices, regardless of whether someone retrieved one of those copies and read the book, the author not only wouldn't be harmed, they likely wouldn't ever know it even happened.

The actual harm (more technically a negative consequence rather than an act of malicious harm) in this case occurs when a person works hard on something useful to others, but their labor is not rewarded, which also means they cannot continue to work or continue to make useful things. The distinction between this and theft is important because the way to effectively solve that problem (without creating more, arguably worse problems) is quite different.

There is an assumption that copyright is necessary to maintain an incentive to create things like software and art and scientific research, but I don't agree with this assertion, either. Copyright ostensibly protects a business model, not the incentive itself, and I think it does a poor job of that as well. In an ideal world in which copyright was not enforced, I believe people would still purchase software licenses and fund development. Part of the reason why I believe this is because it is often so trivially easy to pirate creative works -- like FL Studio, for example -- yet people purchase it anyway, and it is still funded. I could have chosen to go on using an unlicensed copy of FL Studio for my entire life, and no doubt some do, but for the majority of those who do purchase the license -- not just "pirates," but literally everyone -- I don't think the fear of legal consequences plays much of a role, and neither does guilt. Not only that, if the software was not shared with me, I would not have been forced to purchase a license, I just wouldn't have used the software at all (and wouldn't have eventually purchased the license!)

I suspect that instead of suddenly feeling guilty and caving to that guilt, or even less likely, suddenly growing fearful of those who might enact actual, physical violence on others in the enforcement of copyright (which is extremely difficult to accomplish on any kind of wide scale, not to mention wildly ineffective from a cost perspective), people purchase software licenses for the reasons I mentioned in my first post. Gabe Newell, the president of Valve Software, famously said "...piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue..." "...the easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates." Image Line has already wisely moved in this direction by constantly developing and expanding the features of FL Studio and creating more and more content, which I think is awesome. I bet that approach alone has done more for the company and its continued existence than any kind of antipiracy measures ever could.

If you've read all this, I hope it wasn't terribly dull. If you're interested at all in learning more about why I think it actually benefits everyone, Image Line included, to reject copyright (and the concept of intellectual property in general) I highly recommend Against Intellectual Property by Stephan Kinsella, who has dedicated much of his life to explaining this far better than I ever could: https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/against-ip.pdf

Anyway, I'm glad to be here, and appreciate the welcome. Take care!

[Scott]

davidneely wrote: ↑Sat Nov 27, 2021 2:01 am I d...

[Quidado]

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[Scott]

Quidado wrote: ↑Sat Nov 27, 2021 5:28 am Hi Sco...

[BnyRj]

Today I bought All Plugin Bundle. Then when I c...

[Scott]

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[Bruellbart]

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[ZipSnipe]

Scott wrote: ↑Sat Nov 27, 2021 2:22 am davidnee...

[KDM]

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[Scott]

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[lupp7]

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[BnyRj]

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[Another Sam]

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[Scott]

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[OldSageWisdom]

I was wondering will the previous owners of all...

[Scott]

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[IPadTouches.com]

I bought the All Plugins edition upgrade. I go...

[SuperTRev]

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[OldSageWisdom]

Scott wrote: ↑Tue Nov 30, 2021 9:16 pm OldSageW...

[thsprodbeats]

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[Hevy (IL)]

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[thsprodbeats]

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[thsprodbeats]

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[friko]

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[SuperTRev]

Finally have >9$ to spend on this deal. Thi...

[SuperTRev]

All these companies want my home address, but n...

[springroad]

Hi Scott, I've also got the "All Plugins" Lice...

[Jematt]

Is it just me...that does not have the 'Upgrade...

[Morphal Project]

Jematt wrote: ↑Sun Dec 19, 2021 8:24 am Is it j...

[KDM]

friko wrote: ↑Sun Dec 12, 2021 4:18 pm Hi, I'm ...

[KDM]

springroad wrote: ↑Sun Dec 19, 2021 5:12 am Hi ...

[KDM]

springroad wrote: ↑Sun Dec 19, 2021 5:12 am Hi ...

[darkember]

Hi IL team, I own the Signature Edition and ca...

[Isomatic]

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[alexgoico]

Hi! I just bought a pack of Flex, apparently a...

[alexgoico]

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[Parallax Shift]

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[alexgoico]

Parallax Shift wrote: ↑Sun Jan 16, 2022 8:49 pm...