WhenToCopy

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A blacksmith making hundreds of copies of a nail is good, compared to forcing that blacksmith to make each nail unique (perhaps by putting a serial number on each one). A person making unauthorized (counterfeit) copies of $20 bills and passing them off as real money is bad. In other cases it isn't so clearcut.

(I thought the format at Wiki:RewriteCodeFromScratch was clever, so I'm copying that format here ... also, the discussion there discusses a specific case of the BadCopyProblem?.)

Good reasons to copy

Computer hard drives eventually fail. Some kinds of information (family photos, etc.) should be backed up so that when that happens, they won't be lost forever.
It takes much less time, effort and money to copy some things than to re-do them from scratch every time. So rather than forcing the farmer to make his own unique nails, and the blacksmith to grow his own unique crops, everyone benefits.
If I give a copy of something to lots of people, lots of people can use their own copies at the same time (rather than waiting for their turn at original).

These are arguments to EnlargeSpace "permit a RightToFork".

Bad reasons to copy

"I have the ability to do it, therefore I have the legal and moral right to do it."
"It saves me time and effort. I don't care about other people."

Good reasons avoid copying

If I have too many slightly different copies of something, it wastes my time when I'm trying to find the "right" one. Also wastes storage space.
It might create coordination problems (How so ?)
It might create IdentityDispute? problems (How so ?)
When someone irrationally holds a "Bad reason not to copy", it may take less effort to build something from scratch or otherwise avoid copying it than to educate that person.

These are arguments to CompressSpace? and "restrict a RightToFork"

Bad reasons avoid copying

"I can make a new version, from scratch, better than anyone else's." Often programmers who think this are wrong.
"I'm not even going to attempt to play that song (perfectly) on my piano, because [Other Pianist] can do it so much better than I can."
"If I copy that, then the original author no longer has an incentive to produce stuff." That's a bad reason to avoid copying when the original author happens to be dead.
confusion between "the act of defrauding another person by claiming/implying that this copy is really the original version." (counterfeiting), and "the act of copying some thing".
confusion between "the act of defrauding another person by claiming/implying that this copy it is your original creation" (not giving due credit), and "the act of copying some thing".
If I obtain all the tools necessary to copy family photos I've taken, I might use those tools to do something illegal.

When I'm learning how to write software / play a piano, I learn far more when I write/play my own version of something that has already been done before, than to simply use someone else's version on disk, even when my version is far inferior. (Clearly my version is not a *perfect* copy, so should this be put under "Good reasons avoid copying" ? Or is my version a (imperfect) copy, so this should be put under "Good reasons to copy" ? )

See [bad copy problem] for an analysis of this and how it affects license choices.

WhenToCopy

Discussion