11 ms·

> The point is that this is my decision. Granting the creator such rights takes them away from everyone else. Why is that justified? Why should one person, the

by hxa7241 15y ago

> The point is that this is my decision. Granting the creator such rights takes them away from everyone else. Why is that justified? Why should one person, the creator, be able to tell other people what they can and cannot do? > In that case, anybody can use it, replicate it, seek to profit from it, claim it as his own, or whatever, all without my having any say whatever in that process. This is a common approach, but it completely fails as a moral argument. You are saying it is right because it is good for creators. That is an argument of self-interest, and problem is it immediately justifies its opposite. A non-owner can simply say: disobeying the law serves my self-interest, therefore that is right for me. But it is also short-sighted. You are not only a 'creator', you are a user too. One might well be the greatest writer of books, for example, and so benefit from increased copyright/IP rights. But one will probably not also be the greatest music composer, and the greatest film-maker, and software developer, and so on. We are net consumers, in a sense. To give producers more is to take more from ourselves. Ultimately, we grant IP rights not because they are for producers, but because they are pragmatically supposed to be useful overall -- that is the only justification. There is no other, no sensible rational purely moral argument, for copyright/IP. That ought always to be remembered.

ThomPete 15y ago
Exactly you could also ask What if the instrument creators started to license the use of their guitars, drums and people had to pay royalties.
- jiggy2011 15y ago
  I suppose they could have patented them (although there would have been allot of prior art), but that patent would have expired way before now.
geon 15y ago
This is hands down the best summary of my thoughts on copyright.
adharmad 15y ago
> > The point is that this is my decision. > Granting the creator such rights takes them away from everyone else. Why is that justified? Why should one person, the creator, be able to tell other people what they can and cannot do? Because, the creative work would not exist if not for the creator. If you take away the creator's right (and I am not arguing that it should be infinite and indefinite), you take away the incentive to produce and expose creative work. In effect, everyone loses.
- ThomPete 15y ago
  This is not true. Artist will always make art and always have.
  - bira 15y ago
    As long as the artist can afford it. There ain't such thing as free art.
    - ThomPete 15y ago
      There is no such thing as free anything. But there is plenty of great music out there that never made a single dime.
  - txxxxd 15y ago
    Yes, of course individuals or small groups will still create art in their free time. You can't deny however that any massive undertakings would be effectively killed. No one will invest millions of dollars to produce a video game, or hundreds of millions to produce a movie if it can be freely copied. It's great that you can make a game or movie on a small budget, but isn't it better to live in a world where we can have both? Does the cost of copyright really outweigh the benefits of living in a society where creative people can devote all of their time producing content?
    - ThomPete 15y ago
      1. Games and movies still makes lots of money 2. Streaming technologies will render the need for physically storing games, movies or anything more and more obsolete. 3. Just wait til the movie houses start using 3d models in stead. You see the problem is that you have to think about this in a much larger perpective to realize that things will even themselves out. With regards to cost of copyright. Then yes when it makes people criminals to the extent it do today and fines them with amounts it do then it is way way way to high.
billpatrianakos 15y ago
> Granting the creator such rights takes them away from everyone else. Why is that justified? Why should one person, the creator, be able to tell other people what they can and cannot do? Then the alternative is that all creators keep their output to themselves and people with this entitled attitude never get to make use of their work. Or maybe they don't make something at all. Or maybe they don't even try to learn to make something and get a "real" job because anything they would create is no longer able to buy them lunch. There are people who want to give works away free and for them that's great but what gives any of us the rights to something someone else has made? It's one thing to come across a piece of work legitimately and then be able to do as you please with it. The music industry is an easy target and even I have a hard time defending them. What about software though? A lot of us here make our living partly due to the protections of copyright. It's one thing to circumvent Apple or Microsoft and pirate some software but what about the indie developer? That guy can't make up the costs with live performances like other types of creators. You either pay for a copy or you don't. If one copy gets bought and 500 get pirated then that guy just got royally screwed. Not all software lends itself to free downloads with paid support. Not all software can be SaaS. So what then? Even open source developers have day jobs. You can't live on PayPal donations and Flattrs. This whole anti-copyright argument sounds wonderful but the world isn't ready yet. Maybe in another 20 years. The answer isn't to get rid of copyright, the answer is to scale it back to a point where it's more sane.
- angersock 15y ago
  Why is it that the folks defending copyright always pull out the "But then creators will take their balls and go home!" card? That's such a repugnant, faithless argument. Numerous examples exist of people creating in spite of the system--and even making a living doing the same! So, the entire issue for indie developers (of whose ranks I count myself a member) can be solved by not making a product until you confirm that it is wanted (i.e., pay me while I develop it, then do whatever). Alternately, you leave the creation of games (which have little to no lasting value) to be works of art, and let the artists and hobbyists make them for whatever living they can eke out. Entertainment as an industry, much less a secure one, is a silly idea. You can't live on PayPal donations Tell that to the guys from Wolfire, or Notch. I'm sure they'll want to know--they've been doing it for years, and would be upset to find out that they can't make a living that way. This whole anti-copyright argument sounds wonderful but the world isn't ready yet. Maybe in another 20 years. The answer isn't to get rid of copyright, the answer is to scale it back to a point where it's more sane. There is no magical time where the switch will be flipped and the world will embrace and move post copyright. Better we solve this--now--then wait until our infrastructure and freedoms are attacked. Before drastic measures such as breaking core parts of the interne--oh, huh, welp. There is no sane part to copyright. None. It's madness. It is saying that we must artificially introduce scarcity onto things that can be duplicated freely--that's mad!
sequoia 15y ago
Let me first state that I'm in basically total agreement with OP and mostly agree with parent, but one point sticks in my craw: >> The point is that this is my decision. >Granting the creator such rights takes them away from everyone else. Why is that justified? Why should one person, the creator, be able to tell other people what they can and cannot do? http://thegatheringplacehome.myfastforum.org/archive/life-lessons-the-little-red-hen__o_t__t_1606.html http://thegatheringplacehome.myfastforum.org/archive/life-le... "Granting the hen the right to distribute (or not) the bread takes that right away from everyone else. How is this justified?" asked the cow. Um, because the hen made the fucking bread, and the cow didn't. I think that our copyright system is bad, and I personally take similar stance to OP vis-a-vis Big Media, but you'll notice that OPs arguments are pragmatic. "You don't provide a good product" "You hurt me with the fees I pay" "The UX of pirating is better." He's attacking the lazy industry for litigating rather than innovating, attacking the middlemen who are McDucking in swimming pools of cash, and attacking their specious arguments about how you're "hurting the artist" (Funny coming from them: record companies aren't generally known for their generous behavior towards artists). Nowhere does he say "no one should have control over their own works."
- ThomPete 15y ago
  The second an artist is trying to mass produce they are businessmen not artists anymore. The artist didn't make the ability to produce in large numbers and distribute at zero cost, that is what technology did. A technology that served the labels and musicians for one hundred years. Now it is turning on them and they start to complain. Bo freaking ho. People make music without making a single dime on it. Great music in fact fantastic music. The big artists are big because the record labels and IP laws make them big. Not because they through some fair game was the best of the crop.
  - sequoia 15y ago
    And I suppose charging for a concert makes them a filthy businessman as well. Should I get to choose whether or not I must pay to see them play live?
nadam 15y ago
"But it is also short-sighted. You are not only a 'creator', you are a user too" The question is: To what extent? If we measure how much income a person have from intellectual property and how much money they spend on intellectual property (if they not steal) then you will see the following: Most people are only consumers. A fraction of people create things as a hobby, so their consumption is not much smaller than their production. A tiny fraction of people produce intellectual property for a living: their consumption is tiny compared to their production. If you are in the first camp then in short term no-copyright may be good for you. But if you are in the 3rd camp, it is bad for you, because in that case you are 99% producer and 1% consumer of these kind of goods. That's why I think that the no-copyright movement is unfortunatelly partly an anti-intellectual, populist, 'anti-civilisational', (ok, maybe anti elitist too) movement: the less creative people's fight to take away rights from more creative people. (And creativity is only partly talent, it is also really hard work, so this movement is against hard intellectual work.)
- erikpukinskis 15y ago
  That's why I think that the no-copyright movement is unfortunatelly partly an anti-intellectual, populist, 'anti-civilisational', (ok, maybe anti elitist too) movement When combined with a pro-capitalism platform, you might be right. If writers need copyright to be able to eat and pay rent, then you are right. But anti-copyright, combined with an anti-property ("anarchist") platform isn't necessarily anti-civilisation, or anti-intellectual. Other structures, like syndicates, architecture, designed artifacts, and other forms of culture, can provide "civilisation". In such a society, writers (and everyone else) would be born with the right to a fair share of the living space and food around them. They would be expected to contribute a fair share. As they got better at writing, people might start to agree that their time was better spent writing than in the fields, and would petition their work syndicate to post them as a writer. (Of course, this is anarchism, so they could just go write the books anyway, they would just lose social standing if people felt they weren't contributing their fair share.) You might say that creators wouldn't create if there wasn't a carrot of Wealth dangling out in front of them somewhere. We can debate that point. I'm interested to hear your thoughts. But in my experience the great creators of culture who I know well do it despite the monetary consequences, not because of them. They write themselves into poverty... orchestrate music into the middle class... paint on a teacher's salary. And yeah, some of them become insanely wealthy. But I don't think the majority of them do it for the wealth. If they do, that would be very stupid, no matter what system you're in. Give everyone the basic necessities in fair trade for contributing to the syndicates that make their food, housing, and health possible, and I think you'd see an explosion in creativity, not the opposite.
kgo 15y ago
Apply this same argument to someone who spends hundreds of hours working so that they can buy a car. This is all done out of self interest. Most people would not conclude that it's okay for someone that a car thief, who steals the car because it serves his self interest. That this is somehow rational and moral because one person's self interest is equivalent to another person's self interest. Of course people who are anti-copyright will be quick to point out that a bunch of bits on a disk that can be infinitely duplicated is different from a physical car. And that's true. But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the blood, sweat, and tears that the creator invests in the act of creation. I could post more far fetched analogies. It's in a woman's interest to have self control over her body. It's in a rapists best interest to take control of her body. Does the argument that each individuals self-interest is reciprocal apply in this case? Is that the "sensible rational purely moral" conclusion? Of course not. There are a myriad of other factors that need to be taken into consideration.
- endtime 15y ago
  Your car analogy conflates scarce and non-scarce goods. A better car analogy would be that someone invents a way to create cars for $200 with 3D printers, and so everyone stops buying cars that cost 100x that much. "You wouldn't download a car" and all that. Of course, someone has to create the CAD designs or whatever, but that's a much smaller industry than all the manufacturing that existed before (so, of course, all the people who work in auto factories are upset that they've been made irrelevant).
  - kgo 15y ago
    I explicitly acknowledge the difference between scarce and non-scare goods in the above post if you could bother to read the second paragraph. The part you're leaving out in your 'improved' anology is that it might cost 10 years and ten million dollars to develop this $200 car. Basically the great-grand-parent is saying that there's no rational or moral justification for someone profiting from innovation, because it's in someone else's self interest to take that innovation, and these two parties self interests cancel each other out to the exclusion of all other factors. I find that to be an extremely naive and simplistic argument.
reedlaw 15y ago
Exactly right about failing as a moral argument. Copyright also fails on moral grounds by violating property rights. If I am not permitted to store certain sequences of bits on a hard drive, or paint a certain arrangement of colors, or hum a certain tune, then my right to use my property is effectively limited.
- underdown 15y ago
  you're right to fire a gun within city limits is (most likely) effectively limited by gun control laws. your right to use your gun (property) is also limited by laws against murder. I could keep going.
kotor 15y ago
>Granting the creator such rights takes them away from everyone else. Why is that justified? Why should one person, the creator, be able to tell other people what they can and cannot do? Where does this argument end? Why can't I drive your car whenever I want? Is your "ownership" of your car really more valid than my ownership of something that I invested significant time and effort (maybe even money) to create, and if so, why?

by hxa7241 15y ago

ThomPete 15y ago

Exactly you could also ask What if the instrument creators started to license the use of their guitars, drums and people had to pay royalties.

jiggy2011 15y ago
I suppose they could have patented them (although there would have been allot of prior art), but that patent would have expired way before now.

geon 15y ago

This is hands down the best summary of my thoughts on copyright.

adharmad 15y ago

> > The point is that this is my decision. > Granting the creator such rights takes them away from everyone else. Why is that justified? Why should one person, the creator, be able to tell other people what they can and cannot do? Because, the creative work would not exist if not for the creator. If you take away the creator's right (and I am not arguing that it should be infinite and indefinite), you take away the incentive to produce and expose creative work. In effect, everyone loses.

ThomPete 15y ago
This is not true. Artist will always make art and always have.
- bira 15y ago
  As long as the artist can afford it. There ain't such thing as free art.
  - ThomPete 15y ago
    There is no such thing as free anything. But there is plenty of great music out there that never made a single dime.
- txxxxd 15y ago
  Yes, of course individuals or small groups will still create art in their free time. You can't deny however that any massive undertakings would be effectively killed. No one will invest millions of dollars to produce a video game, or hundreds of millions to produce a movie if it can be freely copied. It's great that you can make a game or movie on a small budget, but isn't it better to live in a world where we can have both? Does the cost of copyright really outweigh the benefits of living in a society where creative people can devote all of their time producing content?
  - ThomPete 15y ago
    1. Games and movies still makes lots of money 2. Streaming technologies will render the need for physically storing games, movies or anything more and more obsolete. 3. Just wait til the movie houses start using 3d models in stead. You see the problem is that you have to think about this in a much larger perpective to realize that things will even themselves out. With regards to cost of copyright. Then yes when it makes people criminals to the extent it do today and fines them with amounts it do then it is way way way to high.

billpatrianakos 15y ago

> Granting the creator such rights takes them away from everyone else. Why is that justified? Why should one person, the creator, be able to tell other people what they can and cannot do? Then the alternative is that all creators keep their output to themselves and people with this entitled attitude never get to make use of their work. Or maybe they don't make something at all. Or maybe they don't even try to learn to make something and get a "real" job because anything they would create is no longer able to buy them lunch. There are people who want to give works away free and for them that's great but what gives any of us the rights to something someone else has made? It's one thing to come across a piece of work legitimately and then be able to do as you please with it. The music industry is an easy target and even I have a hard time defending them. What about software though? A lot of us here make our living partly due to the protections of copyright. It's one thing to circumvent Apple or Microsoft and pirate some software but what about the indie developer? That guy can't make up the costs with live performances like other types of creators. You either pay for a copy or you don't. If one copy gets bought and 500 get pirated then that guy just got royally screwed. Not all software lends itself to free downloads with paid support. Not all software can be SaaS. So what then? Even open source developers have day jobs. You can't live on PayPal donations and Flattrs. This whole anti-copyright argument sounds wonderful but the world isn't ready yet. Maybe in another 20 years. The answer isn't to get rid of copyright, the answer is to scale it back to a point where it's more sane.

angersock 15y ago
Why is it that the folks defending copyright always pull out the "But then creators will take their balls and go home!" card? That's such a repugnant, faithless argument. Numerous examples exist of people creating in spite of the system--and even making a living doing the same! So, the entire issue for indie developers (of whose ranks I count myself a member) can be solved by not making a product until you confirm that it is wanted (i.e., pay me while I develop it, then do whatever). Alternately, you leave the creation of games (which have little to no lasting value) to be works of art, and let the artists and hobbyists make them for whatever living they can eke out. Entertainment as an industry, much less a secure one, is a silly idea. You can't live on PayPal donations Tell that to the guys from Wolfire, or Notch. I'm sure they'll want to know--they've been doing it for years, and would be upset to find out that they can't make a living that way. This whole anti-copyright argument sounds wonderful but the world isn't ready yet. Maybe in another 20 years. The answer isn't to get rid of copyright, the answer is to scale it back to a point where it's more sane. There is no magical time where the switch will be flipped and the world will embrace and move post copyright. Better we solve this--now--then wait until our infrastructure and freedoms are attacked. Before drastic measures such as breaking core parts of the interne--oh, huh, welp. There is no sane part to copyright. None. It's madness. It is saying that we must artificially introduce scarcity onto things that can be duplicated freely--that's mad!

sequoia 15y ago

Let me first state that I'm in basically total agreement with OP and mostly agree with parent, but one point sticks in my craw: >> The point is that this is my decision. >Granting the creator such rights takes them away from everyone else. Why is that justified? Why should one person, the creator, be able to tell other people what they can and cannot do? http://thegatheringplacehome.myfastforum.org/archive/life-lessons-the-little-red-hen__o_t__t_1606.html http://thegatheringplacehome.myfastforum.org/archive/life-le... "Granting the hen the right to distribute (or not) the bread takes that right away from everyone else. How is this justified?" asked the cow. Um, because the hen made the fucking bread, and the cow didn't. I think that our copyright system is bad, and I personally take similar stance to OP vis-a-vis Big Media, but you'll notice that OPs arguments are pragmatic. "You don't provide a good product" "You hurt me with the fees I pay" "The UX of pirating is better." He's attacking the lazy industry for litigating rather than innovating, attacking the middlemen who are McDucking in swimming pools of cash, and attacking their specious arguments about how you're "hurting the artist" (Funny coming from them: record companies aren't generally known for their generous behavior towards artists). Nowhere does he say "no one should have control over their own works."

ThomPete 15y ago
The second an artist is trying to mass produce they are businessmen not artists anymore. The artist didn't make the ability to produce in large numbers and distribute at zero cost, that is what technology did. A technology that served the labels and musicians for one hundred years. Now it is turning on them and they start to complain. Bo freaking ho. People make music without making a single dime on it. Great music in fact fantastic music. The big artists are big because the record labels and IP laws make them big. Not because they through some fair game was the best of the crop.
- sequoia 15y ago
  And I suppose charging for a concert makes them a filthy businessman as well. Should I get to choose whether or not I must pay to see them play live?

nadam 15y ago

"But it is also short-sighted. You are not only a 'creator', you are a user too" The question is: To what extent? If we measure how much income a person have from intellectual property and how much money they spend on intellectual property (if they not steal) then you will see the following: Most people are only consumers. A fraction of people create things as a hobby, so their consumption is not much smaller than their production. A tiny fraction of people produce intellectual property for a living: their consumption is tiny compared to their production. If you are in the first camp then in short term no-copyright may be good for you. But if you are in the 3rd camp, it is bad for you, because in that case you are 99% producer and 1% consumer of these kind of goods. That's why I think that the no-copyright movement is unfortunatelly partly an anti-intellectual, populist, 'anti-civilisational', (ok, maybe anti elitist too) movement: the less creative people's fight to take away rights from more creative people. (And creativity is only partly talent, it is also really hard work, so this movement is against hard intellectual work.)

erikpukinskis 15y ago
That's why I think that the no-copyright movement is unfortunatelly partly an anti-intellectual, populist, 'anti-civilisational', (ok, maybe anti elitist too) movement When combined with a pro-capitalism platform, you might be right. If writers need copyright to be able to eat and pay rent, then you are right. But anti-copyright, combined with an anti-property ("anarchist") platform isn't necessarily anti-civilisation, or anti-intellectual. Other structures, like syndicates, architecture, designed artifacts, and other forms of culture, can provide "civilisation". In such a society, writers (and everyone else) would be born with the right to a fair share of the living space and food around them. They would be expected to contribute a fair share. As they got better at writing, people might start to agree that their time was better spent writing than in the fields, and would petition their work syndicate to post them as a writer. (Of course, this is anarchism, so they could just go write the books anyway, they would just lose social standing if people felt they weren't contributing their fair share.) You might say that creators wouldn't create if there wasn't a carrot of Wealth dangling out in front of them somewhere. We can debate that point. I'm interested to hear your thoughts. But in my experience the great creators of culture who I know well do it despite the monetary consequences, not because of them. They write themselves into poverty... orchestrate music into the middle class... paint on a teacher's salary. And yeah, some of them become insanely wealthy. But I don't think the majority of them do it for the wealth. If they do, that would be very stupid, no matter what system you're in. Give everyone the basic necessities in fair trade for contributing to the syndicates that make their food, housing, and health possible, and I think you'd see an explosion in creativity, not the opposite.

kgo 15y ago

Apply this same argument to someone who spends hundreds of hours working so that they can buy a car. This is all done out of self interest. Most people would not conclude that it's okay for someone that a car thief, who steals the car because it serves his self interest. That this is somehow rational and moral because one person's self interest is equivalent to another person's self interest. Of course people who are anti-copyright will be quick to point out that a bunch of bits on a disk that can be infinitely duplicated is different from a physical car. And that's true. But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the blood, sweat, and tears that the creator invests in the act of creation. I could post more far fetched analogies. It's in a woman's interest to have self control over her body. It's in a rapists best interest to take control of her body. Does the argument that each individuals self-interest is reciprocal apply in this case? Is that the "sensible rational purely moral" conclusion? Of course not. There are a myriad of other factors that need to be taken into consideration.

endtime 15y ago
Your car analogy conflates scarce and non-scarce goods. A better car analogy would be that someone invents a way to create cars for $200 with 3D printers, and so everyone stops buying cars that cost 100x that much. "You wouldn't download a car" and all that. Of course, someone has to create the CAD designs or whatever, but that's a much smaller industry than all the manufacturing that existed before (so, of course, all the people who work in auto factories are upset that they've been made irrelevant).
- kgo 15y ago
  I explicitly acknowledge the difference between scarce and non-scare goods in the above post if you could bother to read the second paragraph. The part you're leaving out in your 'improved' anology is that it might cost 10 years and ten million dollars to develop this $200 car. Basically the great-grand-parent is saying that there's no rational or moral justification for someone profiting from innovation, because it's in someone else's self interest to take that innovation, and these two parties self interests cancel each other out to the exclusion of all other factors. I find that to be an extremely naive and simplistic argument.

reedlaw 15y ago

Exactly right about failing as a moral argument. Copyright also fails on moral grounds by violating property rights. If I am not permitted to store certain sequences of bits on a hard drive, or paint a certain arrangement of colors, or hum a certain tune, then my right to use my property is effectively limited.

underdown 15y ago
you're right to fire a gun within city limits is (most likely) effectively limited by gun control laws. your right to use your gun (property) is also limited by laws against murder. I could keep going.

kotor 15y ago

>Granting the creator such rights takes them away from everyone else. Why is that justified? Why should one person, the creator, be able to tell other people what they can and cannot do? Where does this argument end? Why can't I drive your car whenever I want? Is your "ownership" of your car really more valid than my ownership of something that I invested significant time and effort (maybe even money) to create, and if so, why?