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You are assuming that restrictive copyright should be a personal choice. That is not a generally accepted concept. The majority has many legitimate claims to re

by Snoptic 14y ago

You are assuming that restrictive copyright should be a personal choice. That is not a generally accepted concept. The majority has many legitimate claims to restrict the power of an individual, in general.

yakiv 14y ago
Or to not give an individual power in the first place.
zokier 14y ago
Yes, I was mostly expressing my personal opinion. I do recognize that some people think that authors control should be significantly limited or even non-existent. For those people I must just submit to "agree to disagree". I believe that the limits of author control are fundamentally almost purely subjective. I also believe that people having informed anti-copyright stance are still fairly small minority of the general populace even with the rampant "piracy" going on.
rayiner 14y ago
I'm a liberal and totally believe that the majority has many legitimate claims to restrict the power of the individual. At the same time, I can't think of a situation where that justification is weaker than for creative works. As a general rule, society has more justification for regulating private conduct the more that private conduct has externalized impacts. E.g. we don't treat air pollution as a matter of personal choice because it harms others. Most people have no problem with private property, but it is in a way more of an imposition on the public than copyright. If you own a plot of land on Manhattan, you didn't create that land. It was there before you existed. You didn't fight to take that land from the natives. Your ancestors did that. You can tell people who want to live on your land to find their own, but there is only so much of it to go around. None of these justifications for regulating private property are applicable to creative works. If I write a program, I created it. It didn't exist before. At the same time, if I tell someone else to go write their own program instead of using mine, there is an infinite variety of programs that exist that they could write and call their own. They don't have to move out to Long Island, so to speak, to stake out their own little plot.

by Snoptic 14y ago

yakiv 14y ago

Or to not give an individual power in the first place.

zokier 14y ago

Yes, I was mostly expressing my personal opinion. I do recognize that some people think that authors control should be significantly limited or even non-existent. For those people I must just submit to "agree to disagree". I believe that the limits of author control are fundamentally almost purely subjective. I also believe that people having informed anti-copyright stance are still fairly small minority of the general populace even with the rampant "piracy" going on.

rayiner 14y ago

I'm a liberal and totally believe that the majority has many legitimate claims to restrict the power of the individual. At the same time, I can't think of a situation where that justification is weaker than for creative works. As a general rule, society has more justification for regulating private conduct the more that private conduct has externalized impacts. E.g. we don't treat air pollution as a matter of personal choice because it harms others. Most people have no problem with private property, but it is in a way more of an imposition on the public than copyright. If you own a plot of land on Manhattan, you didn't create that land. It was there before you existed. You didn't fight to take that land from the natives. Your ancestors did that. You can tell people who want to live on your land to find their own, but there is only so much of it to go around. None of these justifications for regulating private property are applicable to creative works. If I write a program, I created it. It didn't exist before. At the same time, if I tell someone else to go write their own program instead of using mine, there is an infinite variety of programs that exist that they could write and call their own. They don't have to move out to Long Island, so to speak, to stake out their own little plot.