5 ms·

Oh come on, where are there so many copyright apologists here? Even if you're a capitalist the concept of intellectual property doesn't make any sense.

by duairc 15y ago

dasil003 15y ago
Don't be blinded by the abuse of copyright by megacorps. The idea that if someone works hard on something, they ought to have some commercial control over it is sound. Imagine you wrote a 1000-page novel. Isn't it reasonable for the government to grant you exclusive publishing rights for 14 years? It certainly seems like a sensible incentive for you as a creator. It's hard to make the case that you deserve nothing simply because copying bits is easy.
- thehotdon 15y ago
  If you intend to make money from your novel, it's your responsibility to find a way to capitalize on it. Obvious approaches include collecting funding/reservations in advance or asking for donations after the fact. If you release a digital copy of your novel online, it's quite likely that at least a few people will copy it. However, there's also a pretty good chance it will attract more future customers.
  - danssig 15y ago
    >or asking for donations after the fact. Right, so if you provide a service you can charge what the market will bear but if you provide an art that happens to be convertible to digital form you need to get on your knees with your hat outstretched and beg for your income. Do you people actually think about what you're saying?
    - vidarh 15y ago
      Society has no obligation to make your preferred business model profitable. You don't have a right to make profit, only to try. In this case copyright only exists as an explicit tradeoff by society in order to gain other benefits. If those benefits can be obtained cheaper and/or without the limits imposed by copyright through other means, or if society decides the tradeoff is not worth it, then tough.
      - cobrausn 15y ago
        Yes, but we don't have a completely free market. We can (and do, all the time actually) put in place rules and regulations that make favorable things which would not be under a completely free market. This can include laws against doing things you could do for free, such as copying some digital media and giving it away for free. I personally don't think it's an unreasonable restriction until some way is figured out to compensate creators of digital media for their efforts that doesn't care about digital piracy. I do have a problem with some of the efforts that are being put in place to enforce these rules though, much in the same way I have a problem with the TSA.
      - danssig 15y ago
        The proper response here is for artists to stop producing until society decides art is worth paying for. Begging like a homeless person is not a business model.
- toyg 15y ago
  The idea that if someone works hard on something, they ought to have some commercial control over it is sound. Doesn't pass my personal "plumber test": the plumber works hard on plumbing an office, should he have commercial control on those tubes for 14+ years?
  - krzyk 15y ago
    Exactly. If we give authors publishing right for 14+ years, then they don't have incentive to write another book for ... 14 years. And I think that 14 years might be OK, but currently it's more like 70 years. Even AFTER the author is dead, which is ridiculous.
  - danssig 15y ago
    This has to be one of the worst analogies on the subject I've ever seen. To fix it we would have to invent a device that can scan something the plumber has done and then recreate it on demand. At that point, after years and years of studying to be the best plumber he can be, Joe Plumber goes out and does a job only to have some joker come up, scan his work and then provide his own plumbing service for 1/4th the price. How is Joe Plumber to compete? He could try dropping his prices to 1/4th but then the joker will just drop his again (since he has nothing invested he can do this). At some point, no one would be stupid enough to invest in learning to be a plumber ever again. Everyone would just get this magical copy device. Of course, the problem is that when that finally happened we would be locked into whatever we had when the last plumber stopped producing.
    - toyg 15y ago
      To fix it we would have to invent a device that can scan something the plumber has done and then recreate it on demand. It's called China, and that's why prices for units of work in most industries have been falling, in real terms, for the last 30 years. An author's unit of work is the same unit of work as a plumber's; the difference is that, in the author's case, the client is not the real client: the work is commissioned by a reseller (the editor), and the reseller wants to enjoy all the advantages of cultural work (low costs, infinite duplication) without any of the downsides. Whenever they find a downside, they force a law to remove it artificially.
- vidarh 15y ago
  Most people who write novels never make any money of them, because they never get published. Most of the ones that do, makes a pittance. The percentage of authors that actually makes a living publishing novels is vanishingly small. If the possibility of making lots of money writing novels is a big incentive for you, presumably you're the type of person who also think they have a good shot at making it big in Vegas. I'm not necessarily dead set against copyright, but if these people are largely incentivized by money, then society could solve that issue far cheaper and with far fewer restrictions than what copyright provides for, and still pay these people more money than they get today, by creating grants awarded based on some measure of popularity.
  - geebee 15y ago
    Even if a novel is unlikely to have great commercial value, I see a great benefit to short term copyright that provides meaningful but limited control over the work to the creator. It's difficult to know what will be valuable in advance. Now, the current copyright of "life of the author plus seventy years, and oh, wait, is that expiring? on second thought, let's go ahead and add another fifty years unless we decide to go ahead and tack on another fifty years at some point in the future"... that is utterly unjustifiable. But keep in mind, even the EFF put out a comic satirizing both extremes IP protection ("information, like, wants to be free").
  - dasil003 15y ago
    You have completely and utterly missed my point. Look at it this way: Why should the only person rewarded for a digital good be the best salesman? Without copyright, anyone who writes a book will immediately have it taken by a big publishing company with the best distribution channels and be crushed in the market. The little guy will never be able to compete with that. Whatever small chance at financial reward from writing now will be replaced by the ability to get a contract in place with the dominant market leader before you even start writing. Sure some people will still write for the love of writing, but it will be the kind of thing that terrifies parents even more than does now, and it will be discouraged by popular opinion. Honestly, what is the argument against giving someone limited exclusive rights to their own work? 14 years was the original term of copyright, and that doesn't seem like an unreasonable time to wait for something to enter the public domain, after which we all get the full public benefit. Again, just because Disney lobbied for and raped the law doesn't mean it's not a good idea. I think the ridiculousness of software patents has caused a disproportionate number of hackers to go totally fundamental on the concept of intellectual property even though there is a very strong common sense legitimacy to certain forms of it.

Oh come on, where are there so many copyright apologists here? Even if you're a capitalist the concept of intellectual property doesn't make any sense.

by duairc 15y ago

Oh come on, where are there so many copyright apologists here? Even if you're a capitalist the concept of intellectual property doesn't make any sense.

dasil003 15y ago

Don't be blinded by the abuse of copyright by megacorps. The idea that if someone works hard on something, they ought to have some commercial control over it is sound. Imagine you wrote a 1000-page novel. Isn't it reasonable for the government to grant you exclusive publishing rights for 14 years? It certainly seems like a sensible incentive for you as a creator. It's hard to make the case that you deserve nothing simply because copying bits is easy.

thehotdon 15y ago
If you intend to make money from your novel, it's your responsibility to find a way to capitalize on it. Obvious approaches include collecting funding/reservations in advance or asking for donations after the fact. If you release a digital copy of your novel online, it's quite likely that at least a few people will copy it. However, there's also a pretty good chance it will attract more future customers.
- danssig 15y ago
  >or asking for donations after the fact. Right, so if you provide a service you can charge what the market will bear but if you provide an art that happens to be convertible to digital form you need to get on your knees with your hat outstretched and beg for your income. Do you people actually think about what you're saying?
  - vidarh 15y ago
    Society has no obligation to make your preferred business model profitable. You don't have a right to make profit, only to try. In this case copyright only exists as an explicit tradeoff by society in order to gain other benefits. If those benefits can be obtained cheaper and/or without the limits imposed by copyright through other means, or if society decides the tradeoff is not worth it, then tough.
    - cobrausn 15y ago
      Yes, but we don't have a completely free market. We can (and do, all the time actually) put in place rules and regulations that make favorable things which would not be under a completely free market. This can include laws against doing things you could do for free, such as copying some digital media and giving it away for free. I personally don't think it's an unreasonable restriction until some way is figured out to compensate creators of digital media for their efforts that doesn't care about digital piracy. I do have a problem with some of the efforts that are being put in place to enforce these rules though, much in the same way I have a problem with the TSA.
    - danssig 15y ago
      The proper response here is for artists to stop producing until society decides art is worth paying for. Begging like a homeless person is not a business model.
toyg 15y ago
The idea that if someone works hard on something, they ought to have some commercial control over it is sound. Doesn't pass my personal "plumber test": the plumber works hard on plumbing an office, should he have commercial control on those tubes for 14+ years?
- krzyk 15y ago
  Exactly. If we give authors publishing right for 14+ years, then they don't have incentive to write another book for ... 14 years. And I think that 14 years might be OK, but currently it's more like 70 years. Even AFTER the author is dead, which is ridiculous.
- danssig 15y ago
  This has to be one of the worst analogies on the subject I've ever seen. To fix it we would have to invent a device that can scan something the plumber has done and then recreate it on demand. At that point, after years and years of studying to be the best plumber he can be, Joe Plumber goes out and does a job only to have some joker come up, scan his work and then provide his own plumbing service for 1/4th the price. How is Joe Plumber to compete? He could try dropping his prices to 1/4th but then the joker will just drop his again (since he has nothing invested he can do this). At some point, no one would be stupid enough to invest in learning to be a plumber ever again. Everyone would just get this magical copy device. Of course, the problem is that when that finally happened we would be locked into whatever we had when the last plumber stopped producing.
  - toyg 15y ago
    To fix it we would have to invent a device that can scan something the plumber has done and then recreate it on demand. It's called China, and that's why prices for units of work in most industries have been falling, in real terms, for the last 30 years. An author's unit of work is the same unit of work as a plumber's; the difference is that, in the author's case, the client is not the real client: the work is commissioned by a reseller (the editor), and the reseller wants to enjoy all the advantages of cultural work (low costs, infinite duplication) without any of the downsides. Whenever they find a downside, they force a law to remove it artificially.
vidarh 15y ago
Most people who write novels never make any money of them, because they never get published. Most of the ones that do, makes a pittance. The percentage of authors that actually makes a living publishing novels is vanishingly small. If the possibility of making lots of money writing novels is a big incentive for you, presumably you're the type of person who also think they have a good shot at making it big in Vegas. I'm not necessarily dead set against copyright, but if these people are largely incentivized by money, then society could solve that issue far cheaper and with far fewer restrictions than what copyright provides for, and still pay these people more money than they get today, by creating grants awarded based on some measure of popularity.
- geebee 15y ago
  Even if a novel is unlikely to have great commercial value, I see a great benefit to short term copyright that provides meaningful but limited control over the work to the creator. It's difficult to know what will be valuable in advance. Now, the current copyright of "life of the author plus seventy years, and oh, wait, is that expiring? on second thought, let's go ahead and add another fifty years unless we decide to go ahead and tack on another fifty years at some point in the future"... that is utterly unjustifiable. But keep in mind, even the EFF put out a comic satirizing both extremes IP protection ("information, like, wants to be free").
- dasil003 15y ago
  You have completely and utterly missed my point. Look at it this way: Why should the only person rewarded for a digital good be the best salesman? Without copyright, anyone who writes a book will immediately have it taken by a big publishing company with the best distribution channels and be crushed in the market. The little guy will never be able to compete with that. Whatever small chance at financial reward from writing now will be replaced by the ability to get a contract in place with the dominant market leader before you even start writing. Sure some people will still write for the love of writing, but it will be the kind of thing that terrifies parents even more than does now, and it will be discouraged by popular opinion. Honestly, what is the argument against giving someone limited exclusive rights to their own work? 14 years was the original term of copyright, and that doesn't seem like an unreasonable time to wait for something to enter the public domain, after which we all get the full public benefit. Again, just because Disney lobbied for and raped the law doesn't mean it's not a good idea. I think the ridiculousness of software patents has caused a disproportionate number of hackers to go totally fundamental on the concept of intellectual property even though there is a very strong common sense legitimacy to certain forms of it.