Ok, thanks. But at the same time, do you feel others should still be allowed to use software without paying, even if you personally choose not to?

If not, then I guess we have nothing to discuss about, as then we actually agree. :) I personally think it is irrelevant to mention here what we choose to do personally, since we were discussing here what kinds of rights, if any, should the software author have to his work. That goes well beyond our own choices and actions.

And I don't disagree with the idea that maybe (digital) works should become PD after some (rather long, as in decades) time. I'm on the fence with that idea.

It's not about what I feel should be, it's about what I feel can be in the long run. (Though, if you want to talk "should", I feel that digital art should get no special privileges over and above physical art.)

I feel that copyright is both inevitably futile and destructive to culture.

First, it's futile because humans are poor at defying our instincts (look at the obesity epidemic and how adding religion to sex doesn't decrease proscribed behaviour... it just increases guilt.) No law will stop people from sharing gossip or jokes or recipes and, when something can be copied at no cost, our instincts stop thinking "my ball" and start thinking "hey, did you hear the one about...".

(Speaking of which, jokes, recipes, and the non-logo parts of fashion designs are not eligible for special protection, yet they still survive.)

Second, it's destructive for the following reasons:

1. Until roughly 100 years ago, culture other than books had no "industry" jealously guarding it and it flourished. Famous pieces as recent as Woodie Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" are based on common melodies that were floating around at the time. Culture survived.

John Philip Sousa is on record as having bemoaned the culture-stifling effects of recorded music, which changed music from a participatory "let's all sing together" activity to "let's shut up and listen".

This concept of a composition as locked-down, unchanging, and something subject to "performance rights" is one of the most destructive things to ever happen to musical culture.

We build upon the cultural context in which we exist. Disney does that with all of their most famous films, yet they lobby for extended copyright every time their own creations are about to enter the public domain.

If the U.S. hadn't ignored British copyrights, it wouldn't have experienced the massive cultural head start it got. (In fact, Hollywood has no right to throw stones. They set up in California specifically because it was out of reach of Thomas Edison's patent lawyers.)

2. Copyright imposes a chilling effect on culture. In my case, I don't attempt to experiment with composing music because I'm a highly risk-averse person and I'm terrified I'll accidentally regurgitate some melody fragments that I heard so long ago that I've forgotten they're not "original".

In the case of the fan-game Super Mario Bros. X, by cease-and-desisting something which was and still is not available via any other means at any price.

3. We must never lose sight of the trade-off. What freedoms and opportunities do we lose in defending this right to carve out monopolies on pieces of the popular culture?

All evidence indicates that the causes of rampant copying will not go away. Therefore, copyright in the digital era forces us to choose how we address it.

Dismantling the Internet and going back to the days before digital communication technology is a non-starter as a solution. Obviously, expecting everyone to create culture completely for free in one big orgy of communism is also unfeasible.

That means we need a policy for minimizing the number of people who consume culture without compensating the creator in some fashion. (Not all people want money.)

DRM is fundamentally untenable because, on a theoretical level, encryption is futile when the intended recipient and the attacker are one and the same. Thus, effectively enforcing copyright can only be accomplished by identifying instances of people providing and/or acquiring content and then punishing and/or extracting payment them.

There is no theoretical difference between communication and copyright infringement. Information is information, be it a private conversation or a copy of a movie. Thus, to reliably identify an incident of copyright infringement, one must wiretap the contents of all communications to identify which are infringing. (Rick Falkvinge wrote something on this topic too.)

This theoretical equivalence also means that the only difference between preventing copyright infringment and stifling free speech is the laws which declare one to be virtuous and the other verboten. Thus, any mechanism which can be used to prevent copyright infringment with a given degree of success can also be employed to censor with an equivalent degree of success.

Thus comes the question. Do we...?

A: Continue to delude ourselves into thinking that we can stop copyright infringement by force (hard power) and, in the process, bring ourselves closer and closer to a form of censorship that, thanks to automated data analysis, not even George Orwell could have foreseen.

B: Recognize that hard power has failed, that the philosophical and economic assumptions underlying copyright are suspect and must be re-evaluated, and that any successful solution will employ soft power. (Making people not want to subvert the system.)

..."soft power" meaning things like:
A: Revitalizing the middle class (by means such as eliminating the obscene percentage of the economy's wealth siphoned off by rich people and then locked up in off-shore tax havens) so that others have more money to spend and, thus, spend it more freely and further boost the economy.
B: Properly acknowledging that market forces are a more abstract form of bartering and that dictating terms is untenable when zero-margin duplication's "none of the above" option will continue to exist regardless of its moral or ethical standing.

It all comes back to how we address our societal problems. Do we attack and attack and attack until everyone but the rich are miserable and their lives are shortened by the constant stress of being wary of some member of the proletariat attacking them in a burst of temporary insanity (It's been proven that an unequal society is correlated with shorter lives even among the wealthiest.) or do we recognize that we're adults and that adults solve problems diplomatically, rather than by throwing a legislative temper tantrum?

Yes, I like being able to require that derivatives of my programs also have their source code freely available, but I'm willing kill the force of law behind that requirement and turn it into a polite request if it's for the good of society.

Humanity is what it is and I don't want to live in an authoritarian plutocracy just because the rich have decided that their addiction to more and more wealth should trump human instinct.

Thanks, I'll read it later. :) It is not quite black/white question, but I personally still feel it is not wrong with e.g. a song or software author having some kind of (time-limited?) privileges to his work. At least I oppose the idea that everything should become public domain instantly. At the same time, I also oppose the idea of someone (some company) still having strict control over some hundreds years old Christmas carol.

I normally don't like to just link-drop like this, but Rick Falkvinge's newest post is especially relevant to our discussion.
Why Is The Copyright Monopoly Necessary, Anyway?

He draws attention to how badly copyright fails the “necessary, effective, and proportionate” test applied to other kinds of laws and points out that, before March 1, 1989, international copyright didn't exist, yet things like Super Mario Bros. and Die Hard still turned a profit.

(Yes, we didn't have home computers hooked up to the Internet back then, but copyright has only ever been effective against large-scale commercial infringers anyway so it casts doubt on the claims that it's necessary when things worked before the Berne Convention and the internationalization of copyright wasn't done in response to some imminent threat.)

Also, GOG still turns a profit despite selling DRM-free editions of games that sometimes show up on torrent sites. It's human goodness (refusal to cheat a virtuous vendor like GOG), human laziness (easier to spend a few bucks for all-you-can-eat re-downloads from a confirmed malware-free source with no need to re-crack after updates), and the quality of their product that protect their profits.

Despite the fact that, were I a less principled person, I'd pirate before I'd accept Steam DRM, I have to agree with gaben's assessment that piracy is a service issue.