More MacHeist
Friend of the blog Simone Manganelli disagrees with my pro-MacHeist stance:
“Millions of people across the country buy gas for much higher prices than we’ve ever seen. (Some parts of the country have gas that costs upwards of $4/gallon.) And the oil companies reap billions of dollars every week. Sure, people know how much they’re paying for the gas, but does that mean that it’s right for the oil companies to rape consumers and the Earth for obscene profits?”
Oil is a false analogy (as is rape). Mac developers aren’t like gas customers at all. The oil companies are an oligopoly. You must buy gas from them. Mac developers have a wealth of choices in selling their products. They don’t even need a third party at all, unless you count Paypal, which keeps the customer’s credit card information. Yet the developers choose to use MacHeist, not in the same way that I am forced to choose Shell or Chevron but in a deliberate decision that is weighed against all of the other ways in which they can make money from their products.
“Or to take it from the opposite perspective, is it right for movie studios to retain the copyright of a work which someone else created, and then give them 4 pennies for every $20 DVD that they sell? The content creators went into that deal with their eyes wide open. Does that make it right?”
Actually, the movie studios are breaking their deal, in which the writers agreed to take less money from those sales only to be paid back later (which the studios are refusing to do). This is another false analogy because MacHeist did not break their contract with the developers and they aren’t making money off of the developer’s work in any way that the developer did not agree to (which the studios are doing to the writers with broadcasting on the web without paying them).
“So why should the Mac community tolerate a campaign that gives pennies on the dollar to each participating developer?”
Because that’s what they agreed to. Saying that MacHeist is exploitation is like saying that downloading creative commons music is piracy. It really doesn’t matter if you think it’s fair or not. It isn’t your decision to make because it isn’t your intellectual property, end of story.