Laws are made entirely on morals.

this has never been true

your insistence on relevance is giving the lie to your denial about moving the goalposts.

I know actual game developers who released their games for free or under a pay-what-you-want model. They refuse to do so again because they can’t support themselves by doing it. I am a game developer and I won’t release my games for free because I need to support myself. There is all the data you need.

the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”

You know it and you are simply arguing in bad faith

this is rich coming from someone who is moving the goal posts.

you never mentioned ‘quality’ until you wanted to disqualify data that didn’t support your position.

you’re moving the goalposts.

no, they don’t: people make things without being paid all the time.

“snake game” returns over one hundred twenty thousand results on github.

there are over one hundred fifty thousand results on github for “tictactoe”.

just how many paid games do you think there are, by the way?

github shows a hundred thousand repositories for the query “hangman”. assuming 10% of them are false positives it’s still a great number.

this doesn’t prove anyone ever needs to be paid to make something. a single counter example disproves the claim.

so use isn’t tied to paying. one has nothing to do with the other.

They showed you how people couldn’t make these things without people paying for them.

but that’s not true. people make things all the time without being paid.

private property is theft.

Ergo it’s on you to contact the owner of the design, and it’s on you to collect a fee from people using your bridge if that is what you want to do.

why?

rent is immoral

your might owe under almost any circumstance, but almost all of them have to drop with a mutually agreed contract or transfer of property. what circumstance do you think created the debt here? and what if someone walks across my front yard bridge? do they owe the engineers too? it’s just silly.

they still have the design. I haven’t taken something from them. I don’t owe them anything.

not the owners: the designers. what if I copy the bridge and put it in my front yard: do you think I owe royalties to the engineering firm?

when you drive over a bridge, do you tip the engineering form? the contractors? they’re the ones who created this experience for you.