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> Where does the mindset come from Most importantly, it comes from thinking about why the current laws and conventions are justified. They are not simply there
by hxa7241 15y ago
> Where does the mindset come from
Most importantly, it comes from thinking about why the current laws and conventions are justified. They are not simply there in reality. Why do we have them?
It is not about justifying piracy, it is saying we should not even have the laws in the first place that lead to the possibility of piracy.
You might reply that this is ridiculous: simply changing the name of an act does not remove the harm it does. But this is the core of the matter: with copying, that reply is basically false! (Piracy is in legal terms a malum prohibitum not a malum in se.)
Look at the underlying phenomena, prior to any legal construction. Copying is an abstract relation: there is no physical connection between an original and a copy. It no more harms someone to be copied than it harms the number 4 when you write it down. Since copying renders no harm, and in fact the opposite, it is very beneficial, and furthermore it is an abundance, why should we restrict it? (No moral argument for copyright/IP/etc. seems ever to have answered that.)
In practice it may possibly be that selling creative effort is difficult to do optimally without some structure like copyright etc. That is the contention of the standard economic view. But that gives only a very particular and limited justification. Such restrictions on copying are justified only insofar as they actually turn out to help us overall.
Which returns us the gist of the article: if those restrictions do not help much, or rather have comparable alternatives, the justification for their existence is gone.
- earbitscom 15y agoSo if you go to the doctor for a regular check up and they take biological waste from your visit and send it to a company who uses your DNA to make multiple clones of you to be given to adoptive parents who can't have children, you're good with that?
- hxa7241 15y agoThinking about it, yes, that seems OK. It is not clear what the real problem is. It just seems challenging because of the oddness. There is some question of privacy: it might be objectionable there. But that does not really bear upon the core of copyright, which is about items that have been made public. One could pose a similar question: what if someone else decides to dress exactly like you, and go about like that? What grounds are there for your objection to that? (There do not seem to be any . . .) If they went so far as to impersonate you in the sense of identity fraud, there is a problem. But that is really about lying rather than copying per se, like counterfeiting.
- earbitscom 15y agoIf someone wants to dress as shitty as I do, more power to them. And if you don't mind being cloned, then that's fine, too. I just want to make sure you're not drawing an imaginary line somewhere.