Niall wrote:
[...] Software is of a fundamentally different type than music, books or movies because /it/ /is/ /a/ /tool/ used to amplify human effort. It is therefore more like a spanner than a song.
My song helps cause a revolution and is saved as a file on disk. Why is it fundamentally different to other software? Software is just a stream of bits, a sequence of 0s and 1s. "We can't depend for the long run on distinguishing one bitstream from another in order to figure out which rules apply."
I have some sympathy for those who think there are some different categories, but I don't think one can robustly claim it is the format of creative work that makes it different.