Tell me, is copying your fellow classmate's test answers appropriate or allowed? Is copying your fellow student's thesis acceptable?
You're confusing copying with plagiarism.
Why are you arguing against your own perceived set of counter-arguments against your stance?
What? No. Continue reading. Freeing slaves "harms" the slaveowner's ability to own slaves, but
it was never their right to own slaves in the first place.
Demonstrate to me that it is statistically likely in the next trillion years or so that the number would've been found otherwise.
It does not. Fucking. Matter.
Demonstrate to me that it is statistically likely in the next trillion years or so that
the number a method of picking cotton without slaves would've been found otherwise.
Anyway, your fundamental premise is wrong.
Ideas are simultaneously discovered all the time.
If you can do that, your case might be stronger. Otherwise, it can mathematically be demonstrated that any other person would never benefit from the number's existence unless the original discoverer found it.
So? You may, someday, benefit from us dropping logic bombs upon you as we have been doing for the past 50 pages or so. Does that entitle us to some sort of payment?
NO.
And lastly, since you have pointed out, physical property is not the same as numbers. Given that, you're going to find it tough to demonstrate that the idea of 'copying' a number has any meaning. In mathematics, the set of all numbers means each number is unique and only exists once - rendering the idea of copying nonsensical. Since all numbers are unique and only exist once, it can be demonstrated that your possession of it is in fact stealing, as opposed to copying.
Ugh. No, numbers do not "exist once". If I think of a brand new number, it only exists in my mind. If I share it with others, it simultaneously exists in their minds. The fact that it exists in some other mind does not diminish the fact that it still exists in mine and I can use it. Contrast this with
any physical property.