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Hate to even invite the rabbit hole, but even on HN you will find many people who fundamentally disagree with your assumption that copyright itself is reasonabl
by zanny 10y ago
Hate to even invite the rabbit hole, but even on HN you will find many people who fundamentally disagree with your assumption that copyright itself is reasonable in the first place.
It is akin to the marijuana legalization movement in many ways - pot was always illegal, so it should always be illegal, and to question why it is illegal is to be unreasonable. Debate about sentencing, classification, possible medical use - possibly reasonable, but to question the fundamentals starts drawing on cultural and emotional ire and identity that starts breaking down reasonable debate.
Copyright to many works much the same way - especially when no new works have entered the public domain in the lifetime of the vast majority of the populace - it has always been there, thus even if you debate duration you assume it must remain because to question why it exists in the first place is, again, to be unreasonable.
- olalonde 10y agoThat may well be true but in that case, the comment probably should have been "I oppose copyright because X and Y". Otherwise, it's hard to tell whether the commenter really was making a statement against copyright or simply being overly reductionist without realizing it.
- Silhouette 10y agoPeople are perfectly entitled to disagree with the principle of copyright and to advocate for change. Heck, I'm a content creator in several different contexts and I have aggressively lobbied my representatives for changes towards a more reasonable and balanced copyright regime over many years. But the fact remains that copyright is the law today, and encouraging users to break that law is apparently a consequence of what Google did. It's not unreasonable to debate the actual legal situation, not the legal situation that people who don't like copyright would prefer to exist.