You know, that apple thought experiment is quite helpful.
You can pass all the laws you want about how you can’t pick up apples that fall from the sky, that you have to purchase apples for $1 from someone with appleright, but it’s not going to work.
Harsh punishments for picking up apples that lie on the ground is silly, especially if only a few people are punished harshly. If there were cameras everywhere and pretty much everyone who picked up an apple lying on the ground were sent a $5 ticket, people might grumble, but it would seem at least somewhat fair. But if every year a few apple pickers were “made an example of” and fined $220,000, while most of the other apple pickers kept on picking up free apples, that seems pretty unfair.
The trouble in this argument is that people are trying to conflate the current law, the intent of the current law and the morality of the current law. Yes, violation of copyright is a crime under our current law. Yes our current law is intended to advance the useful arts and sciences.
That doesn’t mean that our current system is the only possible moral system.
We grant creators copyrights because we believe (or believed) that it was for the public good to do so. We want more creations, and copyright law provided an incentive for creators to create.
But some people in this thread are asserting something different. Not that if we want to advance the useful arts and sciences we should have some mechanism to encourage the useful arts and sciences, and hey, people like money, so why not give people money if they ATUAAS, and hey, it costs a lot of money to make copies of things, so why not restrict the right to copy creations to the creator, and that way the creator can make a lot of money, and we get lots of creations. No, they’re asserting that the creator has some sort of natural right to control the copying of their work. A moral right to control the copying of their work. And this is, of course, bunk, because there are lots of ways creators don’t have this right under our current scheme. That copyright infringement is stealing. But it isn’t stealing, it’s copyright infringement. It has some points of similarity to stealing, just as assault has some points of similarity to stealing, just as libel has some points of similarity to stealing, just as speeding has some points of similarity to stealing. But it isn’t stealing, and it isn’t malum in se, but rather malum prohibitum.
The fundamental problem is that the copyright scheme worked well under a particular technological scheme. Factories to produce copies of works…books, magazines, records, movies, were expensive. Easy to track, easy to find. Nobody would print a million copies of “Great Expectations” unless they thought they could sell the books, because creating a million books cost a lot of money.
But technology has changed. Copying is trivial, it can be done at the press of a button and costs nothing. It is no longer possible to track down people making copies of books or songs, because everyone has a printing press in their living room that can crank out millions of copies for free, and everyone has a system of trucks and warehouses and storefronts connected to their living room for free.
So our previous scheme, where control over copying was a rough proxy for usage, and granting creators a monopoly on copying their work compensated them and gave them the incentive to create, no longer exists. Get that through your heads. It is gone.
I don’t know what’s going to replace it, but we’re going to be forced to change our copyright laws, because those laws won’t work any more. Granting creators the exclusive right to copy their creations doesn’t advance the useful arts and sciences any more, because violations of that right can be done trivially. It’s like granting the owners of a building the right to sue anyone who looks at the building without permission, but there’s no fence around the building and it’s 50 stories high in the middle of the city. It’s like fining people $220,000 because they picked up free apples that fell out of the sky. In a case where apples fall out of the sky, trying to preserve the right of apple growers to sell apples doesn’t make sense anymore.
Of course, suppose apples will only fall out of the sky if apple growers still exist…if apple growers all go out of business then the free apples that fall out of the sky will stop falling. But draconian punishments of $220,000 to random people isn’t the answer, screaming that picking up sky-apples is stealling from apple growers isn’t the answer. It’s the tragedy of the commons.
Of course, the solution is to provide some other method of compensating apple growers, rather than harshly punishing randomly chosen people for picking up free apples. How should we do so? Well, there are several ways, and each different way has different pros and cons, different methods may mean more apples for everyone and more money for apple growers, more apples for everyone but less money for apple growers, or fewer apples for everyone and less money for apple growers. In my opinion, the only bad option is the last one. And the last one isn’t neccesarily a morally wrong option, because copyright isn’t a natural right of creators.