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Individual freedom against the public good isn't entirely what's at stake here. What's at stake is the individual freedom of the original author against the ind
by natnat 16y ago
Individual freedom against the public good isn't entirely what's at stake here. What's at stake is the individual freedom of the original author against the individual freedom of other authors who want to use similar characters, and the individual freedoms of the potential consumers of the derivative work. It's nice to talk about "individual freedom", but you're obscuring the truth in cases like this. It's not about the rights of individuals against some faceless collective. It's about freedoms for one person trumping freedoms of the other.
If you restrict the use of any ideas from an original work by anyone else, you're severely restricting the speech of others. If I need your permission before I can write about the characters in your book, what's to stop you from disallowing anyone to write bad reviews of your book? This is an important issue, especially when the laws are vague and you have a massive legal war chest. Your expensive lawyers can argue about where things become "public", too, so me telling my friends about how much your book sucks could get me sued.
Overly strict copyright laws have serious chilling effects on free speech. Free speech may be a collective good, but it is also an individual freedom, too, and I think my freedom to speak is more important than anyone else's freedom to silence that speech. Everything can be cast in terms of individual freedom, but more often than not, increasing one person's freedom means decreasing someone else's. That's why you can't just say that individual freedom is necessarily more important than the public good.
- roel_v 16y agoNonsense, because the supposed 'freedoms' of the others (anyone except the author) hinge on the author creating it in the first place. They're all derived from the work of the original author, giving that author ownership of his creations, and therefore the right to determine what happens to his property. I'm not sure where your 'free speech' argument is coming from. Reproducing the words (or music or whatever) of someone else is not free speech. Free speech is about ideas, copyright about a specific incarnation of ideas.
- natnat 16y agoI don't see what creating something has to do with owning it. If I have kids, they are not my property, even though their existence entirely depends on me. The whole point of copyright is that the government decided that people would be more willing to create works of value if they economically protected the creators of those works. This was designed specifically to benefit the public good at the expense of individual freedom. Copyright does nothing but restrict freedom, but it does it so that people will have an incentive to create things of public value. The free speech argument comes in whenever a content creator has the power to keep other people from saying certain things because he doesn't like them, rather than because he deserves to capitalize on the use of his content. The ideas you create don't belong to you; only the right to make money from them does.