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Same. The very nature of information is that it yearns to be free. Information cannot be "owned." The point of copyright should be to grant temporary monopolies
by csallen 3y ago
Same. The very nature of information is that it yearns to be free. Information cannot be "owned." The point of copyright should be to grant temporary monopolies to encourage creation, not to confer ownership.
Thomas Jefferson put it beautifully:
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
- fsckboy 3y agobut copyright is not for information or ideas, information and ideas cannot be copyrighted; it's for creative expression
- renlo 3y agoand why should "creative expression" be owned?
- Jarwain 3y agoIt should be owned as long as people must rely on ownership to survive in our society.
- majormajor 3y agoWhy should land be owned? None of us created the planet... But we have selected an economic system that depends on ownership to drive exchange in a market, so... that's why.
- renlo 3y agoI'd argue that land is owned because it's a finite resource, and that without property ownership people would be in conflict with one another. "Creative expression" is not finite, in fact every human possesses it, it's also intangible, it's ideas, thoughts, ... , which I personally do not believe should be owned.
- wwweston 3y ago> "Creative expression" is not finite It absolutely is. Doing it at all requires time & attentive focus, which is a finite resource for anybody mortal, and moreover a resource that's scarce and has to be spent in multiple places. Doing it well requires significant investment in practice and training, often years of it, maybe even decades in order to develop certain levels of expressive fluency. As with any issue of scarcity, economics comes in. If you want this activity supported, one good way of doing it is enabling the investment of time. Copyright does this by giving people an economic/legal claim on how copies of their work are distributed. Paying for copies has the usual market merits -- the economic reward and signals of value are proportional to copies acquired. There are other ways of course, common ones brought up here are patronage and merchandising, but they lose the market merits, and both are basically another way of saying "nobody should have to pay for the value in your work directly," and merchandising is even worse in that it's basically saying "yeah, you'll just need another job to support yourself while you're doing this thing", which is time taken away from investment in the creative endeavor, so you'll get less of the actual endeavor.
- onlypositive 3y agoI think you're confusing creation and expression. Expression has no value in today's digital world. Creation has value but using expression to exchange for that value is difficult, requiring limits on expression in order for the system to work.
- jrajav 3y agoBecause creative expression can be exchanged for goods and services? Why should metal, wood, or special paper notes be owned? It's to represent work done and value to other people.
- beefield 3y agoNope. Metal & wood etc should be owned because it very much looks like that is very useful in creating lots of welfare for people. The trouble with IP is that there are lots of influential people that very much would like IP to be useful in creating welfare. Unfortunately the evidence for that is surprisingly scarce. For discussion, see e.g. Boldrin & Levine
- account42 3y ago09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
- jasonm23 3y agoI wonder how many people think this is a string... and don't know about these magic numbers.
- vinaypai 3y ago> The very nature of information is that it yearns to be free. Information wants you to stop anthropomorphizing it.
- sdiupIGPWEfh 3y agoI've said before that it gets tiring playing word games to avoid the suggestion that certain natural pressures have personal agency. Information wants to be free like a rock wants to roll downhill.
- bohlenlabs 3y agoOh wow, I like this one!
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> very nature of information is that it yearns to be free. Information cannot be "owned." The nature of information is to dissolve into entropy.
- dotancohen 3y agoYou bought a Western Digital drive too, eh?
- debo_ 3y agoUnderrated comment!
- bohlenlabs 3y agoWhy doesn’t this platform offer a “like” button for answers?
- jasonm23 3y agoYou can click the up arrowhead to up-vote.
- dotancohen 3y agoWelcome, newcomer. As flattered as I am by your want to "like", my comment was not informative and even borderline trolling (by changing the subject). On HN, such comments are better to downvote. Please don't start upvoting comments that stray from the issue under discussion, funny as they might be.
- sdiupIGPWEfh 3y agoThe nature of the universe is to tend toward heat death. Meanwhile, here and now, the nature of information is to either reproduce (to be free) _or else_ dissolve into entropy.
- account42 3y agoInformation and entropy are more or less the same thing. Ask Shannon.
- btilly 3y agoNot merely the point of copyright, but also the basis for copyright in the USA. Specifically all forms of intellectual property in the USA trace back to Article I Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution. Which gives Congress the power, "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries".
- musicale 3y ago> limited times Technically life + 70 years - or 1 million years for that matter - is "limited" - but I imagine 14+14 is probably closer to what they had in mind.