Paul carr’s “angry nerds” piece is wrong about everything

Paul Carr uses the standard copyright mafia propaganda method: equating unauthorized copying with unethical behavior, using copyright laws as a bridge, because hey, everyone knows that if something is illegal it must also be unethical, right?

What Curebit did was unethical. It would have been unethical even if we had no copyright laws at all. I don't even see anybody giving a crap about whether it was illegal or not.

Copyright is a strictly economic concept. It has absolutely nothing to do with ethics. The outrage about Curebit has nothing to do with copyright and everything with ethics.

Playing the devil's advocate one may say:

- Both cases involve IP and money. The immoral of the story is that in piracy the copyright holder loses money from the theft. In code theft, the immoral of the story is not that the holder loses money, but that the thief makes some illegitimaly. Both should probably be considered equally wrong

- The page was "stolen and branded as their own", but

a) only a tiny non-critical page of the product was copied, and

b)There was no way to pay the original creator for the reuse.

I too found the backlash disturbingly intense, given the previous relaxed laisez-faire attitude towards other people's IP in this forum. But otherwise, it's not an issue out of which someone might make useful conclusions regarding intellectual property policies.