That's like saying that robbing Bill Gates and distributing the money to millions of poor people is morally good because it's good for many people.
Unless you systematically take most of the money away from billionaires, which could be totally justified if society wanted to enact such a tax.
In the case of 20 year old source code, there's not really an important norm to uphold.
Your reasoning for that is "it degrades property rights", but you're for publicly releasing Blizzards property for "the good of the many"?
You want the source to be available and you're trying to back into it with some sort of moralistic argument instead of just admitting that you want the work to be available but have no real basis for it outside of personal preference.
Because that's what happens when you try and make a rational argument for why you just want something. You get ridiculous arguments like "it's not ok in this case because property rights, but it's ok in this other case despite property rights".
just the information on the cd, obviously.
degradation of property rights has nothing to do with copyrights.
and suddenly it's very clear, if the round bit of plastic was very valuable (maybe it's gold, maybe it's the only copy), then yeah obviously you're doing right if you give it back.
after you made a copy.
There are different kinds of property rights.
The property rights for the money you have in your bank account are important. (But if we wanted to add a rule-based tax across everyone that would be okay.)
The intellectual property rights for recently-made things are important.
The intellectual property rights for 20 year old code are not at all important. It's okay if we file off that specific corner of the law.
we had to invent copyright to mean anything at all, it didn't exist before. but even animals have some basic concepts about actual property rights (they can get righteously angry about it, for instance).
it's the word "property" in "intellectual property" that is misleading (deliberately, like the word "patriot" in "patriot act"). it's just a legal term, it didn't (quite) magically turn information into physical property when we came up with it (just one or two centuries ago).
oh wait.... something is wrong with that thought process, but I'll let you split another hair in your attempt at a meaningful dichotomy.
