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"hypothetical" assumes this has never happened. Copyright and patent laws came into existence because this exact scenario happened all the time. Edit: to count

by eganist 10y ago

"hypothetical" assumes this has never happened. Copyright and patent laws came into existence because this exact scenario happened all the time. Edit: to counter DannyBee's assertion, I'm referring specifically to this statement -- "it is a fact that simply letting any casual passer-by copy and distribute any creative work with impunity would certainly work to rob those who may have spent countless hours developing such works of the commercial value of their efforts." The history of copyright starts with printing restrictions to control the flow of "dangerous" information, but the first modern copyright statute (the statute of anne) deliberately came into existence to protect ideas by granting protections to authors of content for n years. Until this point. Copyright was a grant of a printing monopoly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law > The Statute of Anne had a much broader social focus and remit than the monopoly granted to the Stationers' Company. The statute was concerned with the reading public, the continued production of useful literature, and the advancement and spread of education. The central plank of the statute is a social quid pro quo; to encourage "learned men to compose and write useful books" the statute guaranteed the finite right to print and reprint those works. Comments to DannyBee's link address this mischaracterization of modern copyright history. One example: http://questioncopyright.org/comment/8491#comment-8491 http://questioncopyright.org/comment/8491#comment-8491

Natanael_L 10y ago
That's not a sufficient answer. The claim assumes that copyright and patents are proven to be beneficial, measurably better than the prior situation. Are they? If so, how? Not to mention, is there any proof there's no better solution?
- wtallis 10y ago
  > The claim assumes that copyright and patents are proven to be beneficial, measurably better than the prior situation. It looks to me like he's only claiming that copyright protections mitigate a specific harm, not that they're necessarily a net benefit.
- zaroth 10y ago
  I think you're moving the goalposts quite a bit here! The original assertion does not assume that the current implementation and interpretation of copyright law is, as you say, "proven to be beneficial, measurably better than the prior situation." The complaint was that "that's not how facts work" but the statement in question was in fact verifiable. If you want to provide proof of a better solution, go for it. Proof that there does not exist a better solution is logically impossible, so clearly not a reasonable request. Were creative works shared, copied, and appropriated with impunity when it was perfectly legal to do so? Why, yes they were! Did the creatives lose out on monetary gains in those cases? Certainly. And copyright law evolved to solve that problem. You are perfectly free to believe it wasn't a problem in the first place, or that the medicine is worse than the disease, but I think you have to make the case for why creatives should not be paid for their work, or how else outside of market economies we should pay creatives for their work, if you believe that would be a better system.
  - nightski 10y ago
    One could argue whether an API is a creative work however. Are you copyrighting the syntax or the semantics? If it is the semantics, then you are essentially copyrighting a mathematical entity (a type declaration). Are we allowed to copyright mathematics at this point? Forever unto me, the tuple (Int, Int) shall be mine.
    - Silhouette 10y ago
      One could argue whether an API is a creative work however. True, though I suggest a better alternative is that some types of work -- in particular, those necessary for effective communication or for interoperability -- should be explicitly exempt from copyright protection, regardless of any creative element. Copyright itself is an economic trade-off, sacrificing some freedom in the interests of promoting what is considered a greater good. In the same spirit, I would argue that the ability of different parties to communicate and work together effectively is a greater good than anything copyright incentivizes and should therefore take precedence. Curiously, the US legal system already recognises a similar principle in the way it treats typefaces. I submit that analogous treatment is appropriate for APIs, file formats, communications protocols, and the like.
- Silhouette 10y ago
  Proving that there's no better solution is impractical. However, the size of the copyright-backed creative industries today, by any reasonable metric I can think of, is vastly greater than the size of the creative industries built around the alternative models that have been tried noticeably often so far. That seems to include all of volunteer-based, crowd-funded, mass donation-funded, traditional patronage where some wealthy benefactor funds an entire work, and pay-what-you-want models. Likewise, the quality of work produced with the economic incentive of copyright tends to be better, often much better, than what is produced based on other funding models or a voluntary basis, particularly in areas that aren't things anyone is likely to do just for fun. (Some people may disagree, but I consider this point so obvious by now that it's rarely worth engaging on.) That seems like decent evidence that no-one has found a reliably better way to incentivize creating and distributing new works so far, and it's readily falsifiable if anyone does in the future. Patents are a different matter. I suspect the pros and cons vary significant from one field of research to another, with the general trend that patents might be useful in fields where the cost of R&D really is prohibitively high without some reliable way to exploit any successful projects, while patents are probably doing more harm than good in fields where they are more often used for sneaky legal manoeuvres than to incentivize genuinely innovative, widely useful, but expensive work.
  - Natanael_L 10y ago
    Market sizes isn't the same as societal benefit. Just like how a modern society built around horses and carts with all the overhead and work that would require wouldn't be an improvement. It seems to me that it is very very rare that it is the copyright enforcement and/or necessity (will) to stay within legal limits that itself is the reason any given copyrighted offer stays profitable. People pays because they want to pay for quality, in general.
    - Silhouette 10y ago
      Market sizes isn't the same as societal benefit. I'm arguing that copyright-supported creative effort overall produces and distributes significantly more and significantly better works than creative effort supported in other ways. If that doesn't imply societal benefit to you, what does?
thyrsus 10y ago
[Citation needed]
DannyBee 10y ago
This is 100% inaccurate Copyright law was created as a way to support a nascent publishing industry by granting it a monopoly. It was not created to help artists or whoever. http://questioncopyright.org/promise http://questioncopyright.org/promise (The history here is accurate and can be verified with other independent sources)

by eganist 10y ago

Natanael_L 10y ago

That's not a sufficient answer. The claim assumes that copyright and patents are proven to be beneficial, measurably better than the prior situation. Are they? If so, how? Not to mention, is there any proof there's no better solution?

wtallis 10y ago
> The claim assumes that copyright and patents are proven to be beneficial, measurably better than the prior situation. It looks to me like he's only claiming that copyright protections mitigate a specific harm, not that they're necessarily a net benefit.
zaroth 10y ago
I think you're moving the goalposts quite a bit here! The original assertion does not assume that the current implementation and interpretation of copyright law is, as you say, "proven to be beneficial, measurably better than the prior situation." The complaint was that "that's not how facts work" but the statement in question was in fact verifiable. If you want to provide proof of a better solution, go for it. Proof that there does not exist a better solution is logically impossible, so clearly not a reasonable request. Were creative works shared, copied, and appropriated with impunity when it was perfectly legal to do so? Why, yes they were! Did the creatives lose out on monetary gains in those cases? Certainly. And copyright law evolved to solve that problem. You are perfectly free to believe it wasn't a problem in the first place, or that the medicine is worse than the disease, but I think you have to make the case for why creatives should not be paid for their work, or how else outside of market economies we should pay creatives for their work, if you believe that would be a better system.
- nightski 10y ago
  One could argue whether an API is a creative work however. Are you copyrighting the syntax or the semantics? If it is the semantics, then you are essentially copyrighting a mathematical entity (a type declaration). Are we allowed to copyright mathematics at this point? Forever unto me, the tuple (Int, Int) shall be mine.
  - Silhouette 10y ago
    One could argue whether an API is a creative work however. True, though I suggest a better alternative is that some types of work -- in particular, those necessary for effective communication or for interoperability -- should be explicitly exempt from copyright protection, regardless of any creative element. Copyright itself is an economic trade-off, sacrificing some freedom in the interests of promoting what is considered a greater good. In the same spirit, I would argue that the ability of different parties to communicate and work together effectively is a greater good than anything copyright incentivizes and should therefore take precedence. Curiously, the US legal system already recognises a similar principle in the way it treats typefaces. I submit that analogous treatment is appropriate for APIs, file formats, communications protocols, and the like.
Silhouette 10y ago
Proving that there's no better solution is impractical. However, the size of the copyright-backed creative industries today, by any reasonable metric I can think of, is vastly greater than the size of the creative industries built around the alternative models that have been tried noticeably often so far. That seems to include all of volunteer-based, crowd-funded, mass donation-funded, traditional patronage where some wealthy benefactor funds an entire work, and pay-what-you-want models. Likewise, the quality of work produced with the economic incentive of copyright tends to be better, often much better, than what is produced based on other funding models or a voluntary basis, particularly in areas that aren't things anyone is likely to do just for fun. (Some people may disagree, but I consider this point so obvious by now that it's rarely worth engaging on.) That seems like decent evidence that no-one has found a reliably better way to incentivize creating and distributing new works so far, and it's readily falsifiable if anyone does in the future. Patents are a different matter. I suspect the pros and cons vary significant from one field of research to another, with the general trend that patents might be useful in fields where the cost of R&D really is prohibitively high without some reliable way to exploit any successful projects, while patents are probably doing more harm than good in fields where they are more often used for sneaky legal manoeuvres than to incentivize genuinely innovative, widely useful, but expensive work.
- Natanael_L 10y ago
  Market sizes isn't the same as societal benefit. Just like how a modern society built around horses and carts with all the overhead and work that would require wouldn't be an improvement. It seems to me that it is very very rare that it is the copyright enforcement and/or necessity (will) to stay within legal limits that itself is the reason any given copyrighted offer stays profitable. People pays because they want to pay for quality, in general.
  - Silhouette 10y ago
    Market sizes isn't the same as societal benefit. I'm arguing that copyright-supported creative effort overall produces and distributes significantly more and significantly better works than creative effort supported in other ways. If that doesn't imply societal benefit to you, what does?

thyrsus 10y ago

[Citation needed]

DannyBee 10y ago

This is 100% inaccurate Copyright law was created as a way to support a nascent publishing industry by granting it a monopoly. It was not created to help artists or whoever. http://questioncopyright.org/promise http://questioncopyright.org/promise (The history here is accurate and can be verified with other independent sources)