Do copyrights violate basic human rights?

Great Debates
81

Hmm.

Society wants me to release my garbage for free. Once I toss something out, it’s no longer mine, and anyone can pick through the garbage bin and take whatever they want. Do they have an obligation to compensate me in return?

Society also wants me to release my appearance for free. If I go out in public, anyone can just look at me without even asking permission, and enjoy whatever witty message might be written on my shirt or whatever crazy hairstyle I might be sporting, for free, no matter how much time I might’ve put into it. Do they have an obligation to compensate me in return?

No, of course not. Just because you put effort into something doesn’t mean you own it.

I don’t think this is news to anti-copyright advocates. The key words are “as we know it” - pop divas and summer blockbusters might go away, but music and movies won’t die out.

People also want clean air to breathe - does that mean they’re going to have to pay for that as well? Every time you take a breath, give a nickel to your neighbor who bought a Prius instead of an Escalade, a dime to the factory owner who installed scrubbers in his smokestack, a quarter to the nuclear power plant that replaced the incinerator, a dollar to the Senator who introduced a clean air bill 20 years ago?

The fry cook at McDonald’s gets paid for his labor. He doesn’t cook up a batch of french fries merely hoping that someone will come along later and pay him, and he doesn’t expect to profit from the same batch of fries for the rest of his life (and 70 years after his death).

82

Well they should get your permission if they want to take a photo of you and publish it. If someone is making money, including making money by avoiding paying for something they should have paid for, then it is a crime.

No. For one the Senator is getting paid for the work they did 20 years ago. If you want to dirty the air with an Esclade than you pay by higher gas bills. The factory gets paid via government subsidies to clean up their act or pay penalties for polluting the air. (or in a perfect world they would pay fines)

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The fry cook at McDonald’s gets paid for his labor. He doesn’t cook up a batch of french fries merely hoping that someone will come along later and pay him, and he doesn’t expect to profit from the same batch of fries for the rest of his life (and 70 years after his death).
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He gets paid for his labor and the artist gets paid for theirs. McDonald’s would be upset if I bought fries in the store and then went out and resold those fries in such a way the blocked them selling their own fries. If a painter creates a painting I can buy it. But it would be wrong for myself to then create copies of that painting and sell them or even give them away without arranging it with the artist.

IP is not a a legal fiction. If it is then all laws are legal fiction. Why can’t I kill someone? The only reason is that society agrees that murder is wrong.

Guess what? Most of society agrees that IP is a real thing. The essay from the OP is just nonsense.

As for time limits, I’m not sure that they should be shortened. I don’t think just anybody should be making Mickey Mouse cartoons. Sorry but that belongs to ‘Disney’ the company.

83

Society doesn’t “want” your garbage, or your appearance. For all Society cares you can stay locked in your room until you suffocate under the weight of the the garbage that you aren’t throwing away.

If there was an actual demand for your garbage or your appearance, you could justify charging money. That’s why you get a few cents for recycling bottles, and why attractive people can get paid to have their pictures taken.

You already do. They’re called “taxes.”

You can’t make copies of a box of fries, either.

When come back, bring relevent analogies.

84

Zebra, you misunderstand what would happen regarding shorter copyrights. Mickey Mouse is protected by a trademark, and as a character cannot fall into the public domain. However, specific productions involving him can. So it would become legal for people who own copies of Steamboat Willy to create new copies and sell those copies. But it would not be legal for you to create Mickey porn, due to the trademark.

The public domain is just as good a thing as copyright protections. They support and improve each other. Copyrights provide an economic basis for the creation of new works, while the fact that copyrights expire eventually allows those works to fall to the public and enrich the common pool of community-owned material. How many copyrighted films has Disney made based off of public domain works? Why should Disney be able to pull from that rich wealth of material for its own enrichment without eventually providing those derivative works back to the commons?

85

No, you want to release it, because you don’t want it anymore. And your tax dollars help pay for its removal. In some towns, you literally have to pay a trash removal service to carry away your gargage. You see no value in it, which is why you are happy for someone else to take it away—and pay them to do so.

You compare creative works to garbage? Gee thanks, I always thought you had contempt for the work—now we know how deeply that contempt really goes.

86

Maybe that’s not enough for me. I put time and effort into styling my hair and making a funny shirt; according to some of the logic we’ve seen here, that means I am entitled to payment, or I’m entitled to force people not to look at me.

And copyright holders aren’t? If you buy a copy of Snow White on DVD, you’re paying Disney for work that was done almost 70 years ago. If you don’t think people deserve to get paid for work they did decades in the past, it’s pretty hard to support copyright.

But that’s ignoring the utility that everyone else gets from having cleaner air. If people owe me something just because they enjoy the software I create, then perhaps the people who enjoy clean air owe nonpolluters something - after all, they contributed to that air too.

Sure, they’d be upset. But the only recourse they’d have would be to tell you to get off their property, and if you weren’t on it, they could go pound sand. It’s perfectly legal for you to resell those fries.

But more importantly, the artist and the fry cook are not paid in the same way, which is why arguments like “The fry cook at McDonald’s gets paid to make my french fries so I can eat them; why should musicians or artists not be able to live off the fruits of their labour?” fail.

The fry cook goes to work with the expectation that he’ll work X hours for Y dollars per hour. He gets paid for making fries, regardless of who comes in to buy them. The store only makes money when customers come in, of course, but the fry cook doesn’t have to worry about that. He also only gets paid once for the work he does: if he spends an hour making fries, he gets paid for an hour of labor.

If a musician or artist wants to compare his right to make money to the fry cook’s, he’ll have to adopt a similar business model. Instead, an artist typically does the work ahead of time without knowing if there will be a market for it, and he expects to be paid many times over for the same work. If a fry cook wants to be paid 100 for batches of fries, he has to make 100 batches of fries; an artist expects to be paid 100 times when he records one song that 100 people want to hear.

Oh, but people glance at me on the street, so there must be a demand, right? Think about what you’d say if someone claimed they had no demand for a song or movie they downloaded, just because they weren’t willing to pay for it.

Aww, you poor thing. It must be hard to live in a world where you’re being persecuted from every angle, where no one respects your important contributions to society, where everyone who argues against copyright does so because they hate artists with the fiery passion of a thousand suns, and where every analogy is a thinly veiled attack on everything you hold dear.

Drop me a line if you ever visit this world, okay?

87

Spare me. This has nothing to do with me personally. And as it happens, things are going just fine these days—and at times, pretty damn awesome. I have no complaints personally.

On the other hand, this has a lot to do with what you actually have stated on this thread. I mean, give me a break. Comparing putting out the trash to someone publishing their book, or their music . . . please. We can see where your mind is.

As LeeshaJoy says, when come back, bring relevant analogies.

88

Uh… right. On the other hand, I also compared my personal appearance to someone publishing their book or music. Yay, that’s good! And hell, I even compared my personal appearance to putting out the trash. Uh oh, that’s bad. I must have real self-esteem issues, huh?

Or maybe it was just an analogy, chosen only for the fact that garbage and my personal appearance are both things I release into the world for free, and not because I’m a mean ol’ artist-hater.

89

Would you mind rephrasing this so that it makes an ounce of sense?

90

No, you pay someone (either through taxes or through hiring a garbage collector) to take away something that you see no value in (and nobody does either, obviously). How does that compare to creative works? Uh, it doesn’t.

It was a sucky analogy, dude. Really, really sucky. Another little tio—when you compare something to garbage, expect people to question your motivations for doing so.

91

Not “tio,” “tip”. I type too fast sometimes.

92

Sure.

There’s “demand” in an economic sense - essentially the amount that people are willing to pay for something. If I record a CD and no one wants to buy it, there’s no demand at the price I’m asking.

But then there’s also “demand” in a less formal sense - the desire that people have for a product. If thousands of people download my song, and it becomes the most popular MP3 file on the internet even though no one wanted to buy the album, there’s still demand for it in this sense.

File sharing threads usually get to a point where a file sharer says “I wouldn’t have paid for this song” and a copyright advocate says “but you must be getting some value from it, that’s why you downloaded it”, exposing the difference between economic demand and desire. The file sharer wants the song, but isn’t willing to pay the asking price for it.

Similarly, if I’m walking down the street and people look over at me, they’re doing so because they want to. They could’ve stared straight ahead, but they chose not to. OTOH, if they could be legally forced to pay me $5 (or whatever I decided to charge) whenever they glanced over, I doubt anyone would. There’s desire, but no economic demand - just like the file sharer, people on the street are willing to consume something I’ve released, but only if they don’t have to pay for it.

People find value in garbage bins fairly often. A few years ago, I got a working vacuum cleaner that only needed a minor adjustment to the belt. A friend of mine got a decent chair the other day. But even though we both benefited from someone else’s actions, neither of us are obligated to pay the people who threw that stuff out.

Your posting history has made it clear that you’ll question people’s motives simply because they don’t agree with you. If someone is opposed to copyright law, or suggests that artists aren’t entitled to make money on whatever terms they dictate, you seem to think it must be because they hate artists or don’t think it’s real work.

This latest tempest in a teapot is just another example - you ignored the half of that analogy that didn’t set off your persecution alarm, and instead of the rational explanation (“there goes Mr2001 with one of his kooky analogies again”), you found malice where there was none.

93

But publishing something isn’t “throwing it out.” The equivalant to “throwing it out” in a creative context would be to place the work in the public domain. If someone does not do that, then they aren’t “throwing it out.” If they knew that by allowing anyone to see it they were essentially allowing any use for it at all, you can be sure that most would never let anyone see it.

This is your opinion—it doesn’t mean that I agree that you’ve interpreted it correctly.

When someone says, “You shouldn’t expect to get paid for your work, so get a REAL job,” but they won’t say that about a clerk’s or a laborers (or a doctor’s or lawyer’s) work, then I interpret that to mean that they feel that artists’ time and efforts are of less value. If people want it, and enjoy it, why should the person who created it not expect to be compensated for it? To argue that they shouldn’t (but other forms of labor should) appears to indicate a contempt or lack of respect (for those whose work isn’t worthy of an expectation of compensation).

When they say, “Get a REAL job if you want to make any money” (as they often do, as the OP mentioned), then yes, I do think that they believe that they don’t think it’s REAL work. That’s pretty much what they’re saying, isn’t it?

I apologize if I found malice where there was none. Honestly. But I am not the only one to call you on your kooky analogies. You really dished out a doozy this time.

94

Well, I’ve got some hard news for you. As a point of law, whenever you go out in public, on the streets and so forth, anyone can take your picture without getting your permission or recompensing you in any way. You must reasonably expect that people can see you in public, and you have no right to charge people for that experience, and that extends to being photographed as well.

If it were not so, the papparazi would not exist.

Something to think about, in terms of this debate.

95

But, in a way, the file sharer has shown that he IS willing to pay for it–not in currency, but in the time and effort spent tracking the song down online. So he has to ask himself, is the hour or so he spends getting a song off Kazaa worth less than the 99 cents required to purchase it legally from the iTunes Music Store?

96

And the way it currently works, the copyright owner is entitled to say, “Fine, then you don’t get to have it at all.”

This is how it works with other products or labor. Quote too high of a price, and the person won’t pay for it. They don’t get to set the price themselves, and they don’t get to tell the person with the goods that they must give it away for nothing.

But “glancing over” isn’t exactly the same thing as searching the Internet for a free copy of it on P2P, which takes deliberate effort (as LeeshaJoy points out). Someone may not be able to avoid inadvertantly glancing at you as you pass by—but they never “inadvertantly” seek out, download and enjoy an MP3.

As it stands now, “I want it, but I don’t want to pay for it” is balanced out by, “I don’t want to sell it for less than $XXX. If you don’t want to pay that, you don’t get it, (but I also don’t get any money).” It is not balanced out by saying, “Whatever I want, but don’t want to pay for, I still should be able to have. If you produced something that I want—but don’t want to pay for—you should not stop me from using it anyway, and there should be no laws that prevent me from using it either.”

97

I think the answer is obvious: if he felt the cost of getting the file on a P2P network were higher than the cost of getting it from ITMS or another paid download site, he wouldn’t be using P2P.

It’s not quite as simple as asking “is your time worth more than 99 cents an hour?” either. It doesn’t take an hour of effort to find and download a file; it takes a few seconds of effort, and then the file will finish in the background while you’re doing something else. The files you get from ITMS are only playable on a PC or an iPod, and if you want a file that’ll work in your MP3 player (car, DVD player, Rio, Linux PC, etc.), you have to burn it to CD and re-rip it, which diminishes the quality and is probably more effort than finding the song on Kazaa.

Look at the popularity of AllOfMP3, a Russian music site that sells music in any format you ask for. Many of the same Slashdot types who rail against copyright use that site to get their music, but why? Because even though it costs more in terms of money than using P2P, it’s more convenient (faster downloads) and guarantees quality - you don’t have to settle for the 128 kbps MP3 someone made from an analog CD rip, you can get a 160 kbps WMA or 256 kbps AAC just as easily. It’s not as legal as iTunes (they’re not breaking Russian law; users are arguably breaking US law, although no one has been sued), but it’s cheaper, offers full-length previews, and doesn’t need any conversion or quality loss to get the files into a convenient format.

Indeed, and I wouldn’t tell someone to give me a physical product, or labor, for free just because I was unwilling to pay his asking price… but that’s not because there’s anything wrong with using something I haven’t paid for. It’s because doing so would deprive him of that product or his time. Physical products need owners.

98

The creative work is a product of labor. It would not exist were it not for the labors of those who produced it.

So, would you agree that someone should not have to share the product of their labor with those who do not want to pay for it? Why should a creative person not be able to say, “No, I will not share this with you, since you obviously see no value in it (you don’t want to pay anything for it).”? Any other form of labor has that stipulation—if you don’t see enough value in it to be willing to pay for it, you shouldn’t expect to benefit from it—why not the same for this as well?

Isn’t it more likely that many people are unwilling to pay something, not because they truly feel it’s not worth the price asked, but because they’d rather not pay for anything if they can possibly avoid it? For example, if they could get away with not paying for their medical bills, they wouldn’t pay them. It doesn’t mean that medical services are not worth the money, only that some people are too cheap or selfish to pay for these services if they can find a workaround.

99

Sure, but that’s not what I meant. I said “physical product” for a reason.

No, I wouldn’t. I make a distinction between compelling someone to labor on my behalf (not OK) and enjoying the fruits of their labor without interfering (OK).

One example: A loud rock band is playing in a stadium downtown. I’m unwilling to pay for a ticket, so I sit at an outdoor cafe across the street and listen for free. The music I’m hearing is a product of the band’s labor, but I’m not obligated to give them money or leave just because they’re selling tickets.

Another: The same band is playing in the same stadium, but this time, I have a friend who’s a bigger fan of the band than I am. He buys a ticket and goes inside, hiding a walkie-talkie in his pocket. I go to a bar down the street, out of earshot from the stadium, and listen to the concert with a walkie-talkie and a headset. My friend is probably breaking the contract he accepted by buying the ticket, but I’m still not obligated to pay anyone.

If he saw no value in it, he wouldn’t want to have it in the first place. :wink:

The time to make stipulations is before performing the labor. Once you record a song, that’s it, your labor is in the past, and the present is all about who has control over the song. Your labor has an owner, and so do the tapes and equipment you used to record the song, but the song itself has no need for such a thing.

If I’m stopped at a red light, and someone comes up and starts washing my windshield, he’s performing labor and I’m receiving a benefit. If he then asks for money, it’s up to me whether I want to pay him or not. If I say no, he doesn’t get to spit and rub dirt on my windshield to take away the benefit–he took a gamble by performing that labor on spec, and he lost. Next time, maybe he’ll be smarter and ask for the money up front.

Some people, sure. Most people, doubtful, considering the CD buying habits of people who download music from P2P services.

100

Legalities aside, IMHO, this is just damn stupid. When you add up the expense and hassle of getting the walkie-talkie and the headset, making sure they work (for your average cheapo walkie-talkie, out of earshot = out of signal range), and smuggling it into the concert, it would be cheaper (when you add up both dollars and time spent) to just buy another ticket.

Piracy is a PAIN IN THE ASS, and those who practice it would probably be better off spending their time earning money to buy things legitimately.