this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026
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[–] TimothyOilypants@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 hours ago

You have written a sprawling critique of the pharmaceutical industry, patent law, and the modern record label, none of which changes the mechanical reality of how software operates. You are fighting a phantom of corporate capitalism to justify why you shouldn't have to abide by a software license.

You argue that digital copies should have a right of resale. What is incredibly ironic about this demand is that the gaming industry actually built this exact system, and it was destroyed by the very same misdirected moral outrage you are peddling right now. Prior to the launch of the Xbox One and PS4, both Microsoft and Sony had the infrastructure built and ready to go for a fully digital marketplace that would allow digital entitlement sales and the ability to loan digital games to friends for set periods of time. To make that work, it required digital check-ins to verify the license transfers. When Microsoft announced this plan at E3 in 2013, a vocal minority of gamers kicked up such a massive fuss about physical ownership that Microsoft's stock tanked and they completely backpedaled. Sony, who had the exact same infrastructure already baked into their dev kits and system software, watched the backlash, scrapped their announcement, and presented the exact opposite plan eight hours later just to look like the hero. Both companies had to scramble to completely reengineer their hardware and system software before launch. Consumers could have had a digital resale market a decade ago, but they killed it themselves because they refused to accept the digital infrastructure required to make it function.

You state that because you pay for your PC, your hard drive, and your electricity, the files on it belong to you. That is identical to arguing that because you bought a television and pay your own electric bill, you own the broadcasting rights to the shows you watch. You own the storage medium. You do not own the proprietary architecture temporarily housed on it.

You claim code is just obvious math and shouldn't be owned. A mathematical formula is a universal truth. A modern video game or digital platform is millions of lines of highly specific, creative architecture designed to interface with servers, databases, and rendering pipelines. Claiming a software platform is just math is like claiming a skyscraper is just physics, therefore you should be legally entitled to own a room in it for free.

Most importantly, you are still deliberately ignoring the reality of ongoing labor. You claim that paying for a digital service is an absurd endless revenue stream for a single creation, and you compare it to cave art. Cave art does not have a monthly server hosting bill. A digital ecosystem is not a static painting on a wall; it requires continuous database management, network hosting, and security patching to remain functional. You claim that equating labor to copying ones and zeros is comical, yet you demand permanent access to these systems while conveniently leaving out who is supposed to pay the engineers to do the daily maintenance that keeps your ones and zeros alive.

You can wax poetic about how art should be free from commerce and how society should iterate without intellectual property. But the moment you demand that a developer hand over a functioning, patched, lifetime supported software file for a single upfront fee, you aren't fighting against a dystopia. You are just demanding that someone else perform ongoing labor for you for free.

The ultimate irony of your manifesto against corporate greed is that you are deploying the exact same economic logic as the nineteenth century industrial capitalists you claim to despise. By demanding perpetual, lifetime ownership of a live digital service for a single upfront fee, you are completely alienating the software from the daily human labor required to sustain it. You view the ongoing work of engineers, database managers, and server technicians not as a continuous, mutual exchange of value, but as an endlessly extractable resource that you are inherently owed. You are utilizing the rhetoric of the working class while making the exact demands of a robber baron: insisting that the labor of others must be cheap, permanent, and placed entirely at your absolute disposal.