4 ms·

Piracy cannot be tolerated by any self-respecting regime. Property rights are the cornerstone of Western democracies. You either keep liberal democracy (and t

Piracy cannot be tolerated by any self-respecting regime. Property rights are the cornerstone of Western democracies. You either keep liberal democracy (and the market economy for culture and information), or embrace a free commons of information and demarketize culture/info.

nine_k 4y ago
The problem is not with copyright and patents per se. They were invented for a good reason: to promote creation of intellectual works, and to help keep them open, not perish in secrecy as in medieval times. The problem is in the prolongation of copyright well beyond reason, to allow entities barely related to the original creators keep profiting. Not that profiting is bad per se! But the limitations stymie both other creators and the consumers of the art and other intellectual property.
brian_cloutier 4y ago
Let's say land ownership gave you complete ownership of the infinite wedge of space extending down from your plot of land to the center of the earth and extending up from your plot of land out to infinity. We might give this imaginary system a fancy latin name: the ad coelum doctrine. In this world air travel would be next to impossible because you would need to find routes where you could negotiate passage with every land owner between point A and point B. That is obviously undesirable, cheap air travel is incredibly socially beneficial. This was the way common law worked for centuries. But once we invented air travel we quickly realized it was absurd and sharply restricted property rights and this does not seem to have been a particularly big blow to "liberal democracy". when you have a bad law it is perfectly fine to realize you have made a mistake and then change the law. Our current system is absurd, "we've got a scientific database duct-taped together by a fucking grad student in hiding, and AFAICT nearly every researcher uses it", let's change the law and take ourselves to a somewhere less absurd timeline.
livueta 4y ago
The problem with this is that "intellectual property" rights are fundamentally unlike physical property rights to the extent that they directly conflict. I'm not even making the argument that all IP is evil or whatever, just that weakening IP doesn't have to harm property rights as an overall category due to the tradeoffs between different forms of property right. Consider the interaction of the doctrine of first sale with copyright in [1]. This is a spot where that conflict exists; if I've bought a thing, preventing me from re-selling that thing (without copying, etc being in the picture at all) abrogates my physical-property rights. That SCOTUS decision didn't undermine property rights as a general concept so much as buttress it: the pro-IP formulation benefits a handful of rights-holders, while the pro-physical-property formulation directly benefits everyone who owns real objects. A kind of utilitarian calculus of property rights, I guess? Similarly, consider DRM. If I can't break DRM on a DVD I bought, to play it on a computing device that I own (without copying, etc being in the picture at all) then I don't actually own my computer or the DVD. That's an absurd dilution of the common understanding of a right that you're correct is the cornerstone of Western societies. It's kinda like zoning law, really: the current beneficiaries can scream about "muh property rights" until they're blue in the face, but the regime they're defending is the greater violation of those rights. So, overall, no: if anything, current corporatized formulations of "intellectual property" rights are a direct threat to actual property rights, which are indeed important. edit: forgot to add that if it's a civilization's-gonna-collapse argument, there's a case to be made that environments with robust physical property protections but weak/no IP protections are the ideal environment for societal development: https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-law-the-real-reason-for-germany-s-industrial-expansion-a-710976.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-... --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_Sons,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_So....
anthk 4y ago
It should be fine to pirate 40-50 years old games, such as the Atari 2600 ones, at least for non-commercial usage. No one losts money. For instance, the World of Spectrum and lots of C64/Amiga sites offered lots of its games legally.
anthk 4y ago
Copyright should last at most 25 years. Enough to exploit it commercially in a lifetime.
- mojzu 4y ago
  I quite like the idea of a ratcheting mechanism, something like copyright for a few years is free, then the creator must pay an increasing amount of money to extend it every X years up to a maximum of the creators lifetime
  - anthk 4y ago
    That would be hell for small companies and heaven for Disney. They could buy everything.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
Let us assume for a moment that I agree with the following premise: <<Property rights are the cornerstone of Western democracies Right now that cornerstone is rather heavily tilted towards IP rights and puts Western democracies at an angle where they could easily slide into the ocean ushering the era ant self-respecting regime is trying prevent. <<You either keep liberal democracy (and the market economy for culture and information), or embrace a free commons of information and demarketize culture/in It is not an either or. It is a spectrum with multitude of options in between. That you seek to put it as a simple binary choice is a failing rhetorical style and will not get you far in terms of arguments on HN. edit: corrected first sentence
the-printer 4y ago
Either I haven’t taken the time to comprehend each individual response to your comment or people are disagreeing with you solely for the sake of disagreement in defense of liberal democracy.

nine_k 4y ago

The problem is not with copyright and patents per se. They were invented for a good reason: to promote creation of intellectual works, and to help keep them open, not perish in secrecy as in medieval times. The problem is in the prolongation of copyright well beyond reason, to allow entities barely related to the original creators keep profiting. Not that profiting is bad per se! But the limitations stymie both other creators and the consumers of the art and other intellectual property.

brian_cloutier 4y ago

Let's say land ownership gave you complete ownership of the infinite wedge of space extending down from your plot of land to the center of the earth and extending up from your plot of land out to infinity. We might give this imaginary system a fancy latin name: the ad coelum doctrine. In this world air travel would be next to impossible because you would need to find routes where you could negotiate passage with every land owner between point A and point B. That is obviously undesirable, cheap air travel is incredibly socially beneficial. This was the way common law worked for centuries. But once we invented air travel we quickly realized it was absurd and sharply restricted property rights and this does not seem to have been a particularly big blow to "liberal democracy". when you have a bad law it is perfectly fine to realize you have made a mistake and then change the law. Our current system is absurd, "we've got a scientific database duct-taped together by a fucking grad student in hiding, and AFAICT nearly every researcher uses it", let's change the law and take ourselves to a somewhere less absurd timeline.

livueta 4y ago

The problem with this is that "intellectual property" rights are fundamentally unlike physical property rights to the extent that they directly conflict. I'm not even making the argument that all IP is evil or whatever, just that weakening IP doesn't have to harm property rights as an overall category due to the tradeoffs between different forms of property right. Consider the interaction of the doctrine of first sale with copyright in [1]. This is a spot where that conflict exists; if I've bought a thing, preventing me from re-selling that thing (without copying, etc being in the picture at all) abrogates my physical-property rights. That SCOTUS decision didn't undermine property rights as a general concept so much as buttress it: the pro-IP formulation benefits a handful of rights-holders, while the pro-physical-property formulation directly benefits everyone who owns real objects. A kind of utilitarian calculus of property rights, I guess? Similarly, consider DRM. If I can't break DRM on a DVD I bought, to play it on a computing device that I own (without copying, etc being in the picture at all) then I don't actually own my computer or the DVD. That's an absurd dilution of the common understanding of a right that you're correct is the cornerstone of Western societies. It's kinda like zoning law, really: the current beneficiaries can scream about "muh property rights" until they're blue in the face, but the regime they're defending is the greater violation of those rights. So, overall, no: if anything, current corporatized formulations of "intellectual property" rights are a direct threat to actual property rights, which are indeed important. edit: forgot to add that if it's a civilization's-gonna-collapse argument, there's a case to be made that environments with robust physical property protections but weak/no IP protections are the ideal environment for societal development: https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-law-the-real-reason-for-germany-s-industrial-expansion-a-710976.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-... --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_Sons,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_So....

anthk 4y ago

It should be fine to pirate 40-50 years old games, such as the Atari 2600 ones, at least for non-commercial usage. No one losts money. For instance, the World of Spectrum and lots of C64/Amiga sites offered lots of its games legally.

anthk 4y ago

mojzu 4y ago
I quite like the idea of a ratcheting mechanism, something like copyright for a few years is free, then the creator must pay an increasing amount of money to extend it every X years up to a maximum of the creators lifetime
- anthk 4y ago
  That would be hell for small companies and heaven for Disney. They could buy everything.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

Let us assume for a moment that I agree with the following premise: <<Property rights are the cornerstone of Western democracies Right now that cornerstone is rather heavily tilted towards IP rights and puts Western democracies at an angle where they could easily slide into the ocean ushering the era ant self-respecting regime is trying prevent. <<You either keep liberal democracy (and the market economy for culture and information), or embrace a free commons of information and demarketize culture/in It is not an either or. It is a spectrum with multitude of options in between. That you seek to put it as a simple binary choice is a failing rhetorical style and will not get you far in terms of arguments on HN. edit: corrected first sentence

the-printer 4y ago

Either I haven’t taken the time to comprehend each individual response to your comment or people are disagreeing with you solely for the sake of disagreement in defense of liberal democracy.