3 ms·
I'm not sure why people come out with these moral axioms whenever piracy comes up. "Monopolists should not have a legal right to their market" Such a big stat
by netcan 17y ago
I'm not sure why people come out with these moral axioms whenever piracy comes up.
"Monopolists should not have a legal right to their market"
Such a big statement with no real way of supporting it any further (the converse is also true). None of the rules around copyright or property ever came about because of any kind of "Natural Law" or moral reasoning. John Locke, be damned. Property rules were created based on existing conventions, or in some cases, created to correspond to defensible borders. You can hum a song or talk about it or play it on your guitar when you get home.
You can't sell copies of it? Why? Because printing, pressing & such are (were) possible to regulate with laws. Humming is not.
- randallsquared 17y agoI'm not sure why people come out with these moral axioms whenever piracy comes up. It's not a moral axiom; it's an expression of preference. More seriously, any argument for or against it relies on so much shared understanding that it's not clear that there's much use arguing about it at a length of two or three sentences. One sentence is enough to express the conclusion, but a rigorous argument that covered all the major approaches would require a fairly hefty book. Because printing, pressing & such are (were) possible to regulate with laws. Humming is not. That's one approach, but how will you defend your right to hum whatever you want when all of your actions are recorded all the time? Our current technological progress appears to be headed that way, making automatic enforcement of any arbitrary rules possible. In that situation, the question of what the rules should be is more than a question of what sort of rules can be enforced.