In other words, you’re saying I’m obligated either to buy it or not to expose myself to it. Not much difference there, IMO.
There seems to be a fundamental disagreement here about why things are owned and why we pay people when we get things.
Indeed. But be fair: I also believe that I don’t own the product of my labors, since I make a living by producing information (and spend much of my free time doing it as well).
I don’t believe that putting effort into something grants ownership of it - otherwise, one might argue that your barber owns your haircut, your dry cleaner owns the clean appearance of your suits, etc.
Take it? Of course not: I have no right to break into your home or office and steal the hard drive, manuscript, or whatever else you might have it recorded on, thus depriving you of what you wrote.
Make a copy? Sure.
I hate to nitpick your phrasing like that, but come on. You’re using words like “take something that doesn’t belong to you” because they strike an emotional chord, ignoring the fact that the very reason they strike that chord is because we’re all used to hearing them in connection with physical property, the kind that can actually be taken away from its owner. It’s a shame that the same word in English refers to both obtaining something and depriving another person of it, but we must remember that with copyrighted works, we’re only talking about obtaining a copy.
I’m not one of those people who thinks an unjust law must be followed simply because it’s the law.
I didn’t think my actions were the subject of debate, and I haven’t said anything about them in this thread. Surely you understand my reluctance to discuss personal details like that, especially on a subject the SDMB mods are so touchy about.
I will adamantly deny that the act of copying itself causes any financial harm to anyone. It can indirectly result in a lack of financial gain, but (1) a lack of financial gain is not financial damage, unless you believe you’re damaging Olive Garden when you decide to go out for Chinese food instead of Italian, (2) it assumes every download would’ve otherwise been a sale, which is obviously unrealistic, and (3) it can also indirectly result in financial gain in the same way that radio play does, such as when a downloader buys albums, merchandise, or concert tickets as a result of listening to downloaded songs.
An “illegal philosophy”? Thoughtcrime is so 22 years ago.
The basic problem with your position on this point is that copyright is the exclusive right to copy the IP you own and thereby reap commercial gain. You cannot have that and have people copying your IP without your permission. The two things are mutually exclusive. One’s exclusive right to make copies of something is not “still in your home” while others are copying that IP without your permission.
Your failure to understand (or acknowledge) what copyright is causes you to make a series of contentions for which there is no logical basis. For example, since copyright is an exclusive right to copy certain IP, if you want a copy of that IP, you want what I have. It doesn’t matter where you source that copy from (friend, stranger etc) what you want is to copy it, and that involves wanting what the owner of the IP has and you do not.
I understand that you do not consider that people should be granted copyright. Fine. But it is utterly false to suggest that, given what they current system does grant, you are not taking something away from copyright owners by infringing copyright.
Copyright leachers are very, very sensitive about comparisons between what they do and what tangible property thieves do. They will, at the speed of a jerking knee, be all over any person who suggests that copyright infringement and theft are the same or strictly equivalent, with indignant screams about how the two things are spelt differently and how the 43rd Circuit of Outer Mongolia opined that the court forms used should be in different fonts or whatever. So consequently I’m always careful to make it clear that the two things are equivalent in basic function, but not details.
I’m not sure I follow you here but I suspect you are falling into the same fallacy as I correct Mr2001 on in the first paragraph of my post above.
No. It isn’t. You are flogging a horse so dead even the horse isn’t trying to revive himself. Evil Captor participated in this thread after my criticism of his statement. He did not try to deflect my criticism by claiming that he meant what he said only in the context of the moderating qualifications you attribute to him. Indeed he tried to defend his statement outright. Give it up already.
There is at present a greater volume of useful IP being created than at any time in history by orders of magnitude. The vast majority of that is being created by people being paid to create it. If you think this has nothing to do with the law that allows those who invest in IP to obtain a return on that IP, I think it’s you who needs to do some backing up.
This contains two of Mr2001’s key standard fallacies. The first is to compare a decision not to purchase a product you don’t want to a decision to obtain, by copying, something that you do want (which is clearly an invalid comparison), and then to suggest that since the first instance does not cause inappropriate financial harm, neither does the second.
The second is to prevaricate on the specific and the general. Any given specific instance of unpaid copying may not cause financial harm since the copier may not have bought a copy anyway. But one cannot extrapolate that to a conclusion that unpaid copying in general does not cause financial harm, because undoubtedly some people would have paid for copies if they had to.
A third problem is Mr2001’s inclusion in the list of alternate business opportunities available as a result of unpaid copying, the sale of merchandising items. Those sales will only benefit the original IP owner if they are purchased from him, rather than from some third party who has copied the IP holder’s merchandise designs, which is likely since the third party will most likely undercut the price of the IP holder who has overheads that the third party does not. In other words, Mr2001’s argument amounts to an argument that the act of copying will do not harm because it may create other business opportunities, as long as those opportunities are not avoided due to other acts of copying. A weak position.
I admit, I think of data retention in terms of evolving content (i.e., backing up source code and the like); maintaining static content certainly makes the whole prospect easier. Additionally, the near-exponential increase of data storage mediume capacity further reduces the concern. Let’s hope it all works out for the best; upon reflection, it doesn’t seem as big an issue as I had originally thought, but I still have reservations about simply assuming it.
Yeah, EBCDIC is just a 7-bit format, right? (Been awhile since I knew or had to care about that type of data conversion.) The tapes were the show-stopper; data conversion was just insult to injury, especially for an academic department that had difficulty funding an undergrad just to do day-to-day computer help.
Princhester: I’ll pose these questions again, as I think they’re germane:
(1) Should the terms of copyright be unlimited? If not, why not?
(2) What do you do for a living?
Which neatly evades the question(s). Perhaps this will help – you say, “…copyright is the exclusive right to copy the IP you own and thereby reap commercial gain.” But it isn’t; at least not in its entirety. Rather, copyright is the exclusive right to copy the IP you own for the promotion of (useful) art and science. So long as we don’t reach agreement about how much of a role “commercial gain” plays in said promotion, I think we’ll never agree. Furthermore, the intangibility of IP and its resultant characteristics are a major component of its benefit (as opposed to physical property); until we see eye-to-eye on the importance of that fact, I also don’t think we can agree.
That tends to happen in these debates, as anyone critical of copyright gets bludgeoned with strawmen. But OK, again – if it really isn’t obvious to you what he was arguing, then I can’t see a resolution and I’ll “give it up”.
There are also more people currently alive than at any time in history by orders of magnitude. The proper comparison would be the volume of useful IP created today with copyright law as it now stands vs. without. And once again, you cast what I’m saying in strange, absolutist terms. You state my position as: IP creation has “nothing to do with the law” as it stands; of course that’s just silly. My question is, “does the law, as it currently stands, maximize (useful) creative output?” My opinion is “no”, it does not. While I agree that some form of copyright is good and necessary, I don’t think its current form is the best.
This is seemingly a difficult thing for many to grasp: just because I argue that “copyright infringement” is not “theft”, that there’s more to IP than simple economic gain, and that current copyright law is not the best expression for promoting the useful arts and sciences doesn’t mean I’m arguing against the principle of copyright. I went back and read some of the threads on copyright over the weekend; it was tedious and unenlightening. The same arguments, the same parodies of opposing viewpoints (and, I should note, a large focus on the appropriate time limitations for copyright). I honestly can’t see reaching any resolution about this, so I apologize in advance if I don’t pursue my end of the debate to your satisfaction.
See my post #100 and in particular the sixth paragraph. I don’t have a strong view. There is a kind of intellectual consistency to the position that if you own something you own something (that’s the rule applied to property generally). Theoretically the longer copyright is the more it should be worth and the more investment there will be in creating it. But there has to be a diminishing return on that and a point must be reached where a greater copyright period is going to give rise to a trivial rise in investment. There are also some arguments that there are detriments to copyright (fairly weak though they are). So I guess there has to be a point at which you say copyright is long enough.
(2) What do you do for a living?
I’m a lawyer.
Copyright is the exclusive right to copy the IP you own. When I said that thereby one can reap commercial gain, that was intended to be simply a statement of fact, not policy or opinion, and not as part of my statement of what copyright is. Apologies if that was not clear.
Your statement that copyright is the exclusive right to copy the IP you own “for the promotion of (useful) art and science” is as far as I know factually and legally incorrect. There is no such restraint on the purpose for which a copyright owner obtains his exclusive rights. It may be that you mean that you believe that copyright should be exercised for the purpose of promotion of useful art and science. I don’t disagree at all, but I think that in fact already occurs because copyright does promote useful art and science by making it commercially profitable.
To answer your other questions, the actual harm in theivery and copyright infringement is to deprive the owner of their property or part of it. Theft and copyright infringement are functional equivalents because they both negative the benefit to the perpetrator of what they have done and (if you include criminal compensation laws in relation to theivery) reinstate the financial position of the victim.
Actually, given what I pointed out in my last post, I think it is you who is having trouble seeing what he obviously was arguing.
If you want to be misunderstood less, you should learn to write more precisely. Go back to what you said to Pochacco. He said that copyright did not appear to be choking off productivity but rather seemed to be nourishing it. You described that as “an unsupported assertion” that you challenged him to back up. Inescapable conclusion based on this comment: you consider that copyright is choking off productivity and not nourishing it. But I take it that your position is rather less absolute than that. Perhaps what you should have said to Pochacco is that while his assertion has some merit, you are not convinced that copyright couldn’t be modified in order to nourish productivity even more?
Your frustration at being misunderstood as being absolutist would be helped if you spoke in less absolute terms.
You are the one speaking in absolute terms here. Even if someone belives that the existing copyright laws are “choking off productivity and not nourishing it” mean that copyright should be abolished? You are the one making the assumption here. It appears that if someone attacks the copyright laws as they stand you automatically jump to the comclusion that they are saying copyright laws are wrong and should be abolished. The only erpson arguing that is this thread is Mr2001. What Digital Stimulus said is true, there seems to be two absolist positions, copyright is wrong and should be abolished or copyright is fine as it is. Anybody who tries to argue that copyright should be changed in someway is automatically accused of trying to abolish it.
Yes, I said that. It does hurt some artists and writers, though its mostly artists and musicians who suffer, specifically the artists who do collage and musicians who sample. Hurts 'em big time, and to no one in particular’s benefit.
C’mon, Princhester, this just won’t do. Collage and sampling are both recognized art forms. Sorry if it doesn’t suit your legalistic worldview not to include them as artists and musicians, but they are just that. Have you LOOKED at collage? Have you LISTENED to sampled music? If you had, you would realize that the artists involved are taking bits from established works and recontextualizing them in a much larger work to create something new. Sorry if the truth of that stings, but there it is.
In any event, it isn’t necessary to throw out copyright laws entirely to make it possible for collagists and samplers to do their works. It should be fairly easy to establish reasonable limits on how much of a work can be borrowed and how extensively it should constitute the new artwork, in a sampled or collagist work. Most collagists and samplers aren’t really interested in borrowing works of art wholesale and calling them their own – that’s not really what art is all about, is it?
Try actually reading for understanding instead of looking for a rhetorical point. Artists and writers do have a long history of being crappy business people, the most notable being the artist Alberto Vargas who signed a contract with David Smart, then publisher of “Esquire” magazine, that was so bad a judge had the contract thrown out as “contractual slavery.”
The reason we shouldn’t automatically hold the artists etc. who participate in this thread as fonts of sacred knowledge on copyright, is that they might well not understand whether copyright hurts or hinders them. Somebody, possibly a lawyer, once tole them copyright was a good thing and they believed it. That’s generally all it takes with artists and musicians.
For an alternative POV, look at Japan, where the thriving manga community actually allows fans to create works based on their copyrighted work and sell them. Yet manga are thriving and American comics are withering.
Kinda makes ya wonder, don’t it?
Firstly, your anecdote has the smell of UL to me. Cite pls.
Secondly, your anecdote doesn’t significantly support your conclusion. Essentially, the anecdote illustrates that the studios didn’t realise that their archival material would have future value. It seems very doubtful that mistake would be made today. Knowledge that this archival stuff now has or maybe will have future value means that studios preserve this sort of thing assiduously.
So you are saying that in 100 years there will be people who want Wombat’s books who would (if there were no copyright) go to the effort of republishing them, but who would (if there were copyright) be put off entirely if they had to find Wombat’s descendants and ask them if they minded receiving some royalties? Doesn’t sound like they were very keen in the first place. I think you’re exaggerating.
I don’t know. How many? Cite? What’s your reasoning process?
The thousands of artists that work at Disney or are funded by Disney because Disney is a wealthy company.
and
and
And
It’s really very simple. If the value of copyright is highly dependant upon whether or not the author of a work dies at this or that time, investing in IP is more risky. Which means less of it will be made. Which is a bad thing.
The suggestion that copyright owners are asking for unusual privilege is arrant nonsense. Name me one other area in which the owner of property loses their rights because the person who constructed the property died. The only unusual thing is that intellectual property is a form of property that expires at all.
And blythly saying “nothing has been taken away” when what has been taken away has been explained to you over and over and over and over again devalues the standard of these boards and your credibility.
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Thing is, that “right” never legitimately belonged to the copyright holder, or anyone else, in the first place.
I mean, by the same logic, I could say that a copyright holder is taking away my “right” to listen to his unreleased music if he refuses to give anyone a copy. One is coded into law, and the other isn’t, but neither of them have any legitimacy. I don’t have the right to make you give me a copy; you don’t have the right to prevent me from making my own.
There you go again, ignoring the arguments you’d rather not address.
As I wrote before: a main functional element of theft is that the person being robbed is deprived of the item that was stolen. In fact, I’d say that’s exactly the reason that theft is a bad thing - no one would care if a neighborhood thug “stole” their car by leaving it exactly where it was, undisturbed. But that element does not exist at all in copyright infringement.
An act cannot be “equivalent in basic function” to theft when it lacks the very thing that makes theft bad. And don’t try to claim that not being able to tell other people what they can’t do is anything like losing the use of the property you own; we’re all smarter than that here.
Not really. I’m comparing a product I don’t want at the asking price to another I don’t want at the asking price. Maybe I chose Chinese food over Italian because Chinese is half price on Tuesdays and I’m only willing to spend $7 on dinner; that still doesn’t mean I’m harming Olive Garden by making that choice.
Likewise, you can’t extrapolate it to a conclusion that unpaid copying in general does cause financial harm, because some people buy copies (and merchandise, tickets, etc.) that they otherwise wouldn’t have, as a result of unpaid copying.
I believe the sales of such merchandise are driven largely by a desire to support one’s favorite artists, not simply to own something with the band name on it, which can usually be made cheaply in one’s home with an inkjet printer anyway.
As you explained above, what you mean by “property” in the case of copyright is simply a legal monopoly: the exclusive right to tell other people whether or not they can copy a particular bit of information. If you actually think infringing on someone’s so-called right to dictate others’ behavior is anything like depriving them of their actual property–you know: cars, money, furniture, food, CDs, etc.–then I guess I believe that you’re a lawyer.
I’m sorry but I have no idea why you are saying this. I didn’t say that collage and sampling were not legitimate, I just said that they were a very, very small part of the picture, and in no way sufficient to justify your blanket statement that “copyright harms artists etc”
Fundamentally, this whole issue appears, based on your current clarification, to have arisen because you mispoke. You actually meant to say that current copyright law harms a small minority of artists.
It seems to be trendy at present to accuse me of assuming that posters have an absolutist position against copyright when they do not. The problem in fact stems from the exaggerated and simplistic and inappropriately unqualified statements made by those who I have criticised. Each of you, Digital Stimulus and Mr2001 have made bald, unqualified statements, but then squeal when I take those statements at their face. I don’t misunderstand people on purpose, but nor do I feel like it’s my fault if the reason I misunderstand is because the person I misunderstand has made a wild rhetorical statement. You live by 'em you die by 'em.
Let’s get things straight. This discussion started because I said that artists and writers etc on these actual boards did not support your position. I am not talking about some stereotypical meathead bassist or vague artiste. Nor am I talking about some famed idiot celebrity. I am talking about actual real live posters on these very boards, many of whom appear to have at least as much if not more intelligence, knowledge and savvy as you do, fella. Are you prepared to come out and say that InvisibleWombat, Yosemite, DeadBadger, Storyteller0910 and various others I can’t think of right now are not to be believed because they are crappy business people and so trusting and gullible that they believe anything anyone tells them? Because if that is your position, perhaps you should come out and say it. Given what you are planning on saying, you might want to take it to the pit, though.
Now to Mr2001. No one is any doubt, Mr2001, that you don’t think copyright holders should have the rights they do. But that is a separate issue to whether, given the rights they do have, by copying their stuff without paying them, you are causing them loss.
Many of your arguments spring from a lack of analysis of what ordinary property rights grant: you see IP rights as very different, but they’re not. In particular, commercial property is valuable to a merchant not because they want to use it, but because they want to hold potential customers out of it unless they are paid what they want to be paid.
And once again you commit the same fallacy. Once again you are attempting to compare a failure to purchase something you don’t want (whether because it’s too expensive or some other reason is irrelevant) with a decision to obtain by copying something you do want.
Yeah, right. Nobody but those who want free stuff, or are “let the information be free” idealists believes that, and there is no evidence of it.
That’s why “pirate” merchandisers outside concerts do so badly, I suppose?
I really don’t know why you need to go back over all this stuff. You’ve admitted in plenty other threads that if copyright didn’t exist, many works simply wouldn’t be created. You have said you see that as acceptable collateral damage. I don’t know why you now want to go back to an attempt to suggest that copyright leaching doesn’t cause loss when you’ve already accepted that without copyright, losses will be caused.
Scratch that last sentence. What I mean is, if you accept (as you do) that if there was no copyright, many works simply wouldn’t be created in the first place because there would be no means of commercially exploiting them when copies can be freely made, then you must necessarily accept that making copies freely destroys the ability of the creators of those works to commercially exploit them. Ergo, copyright infringement damages the commercial position of copyright owners. Why do you feel any need to deny this when you’ve accepted it in the past?
And just to save you time, I know you don’t think that copyright owners should have the commercial rights they currently have. I know you wouldn’t care if they lost those rights. I know your distaste for copyright is such that you can barely bring yourself to consider that copyright owners lose something under the present regime when copyright is infringed because you can’t stand the fact they have copyright in the first place. But those things are not germane to the point.
Mr2001, you may remember a monster thread you and I participated in on this subject. I think it was the first one in which we debated copyright. I cannot find it for the life of me. Was it in the Winter of Our Missed Content or what? It doesn’t seem that it would be as long ago as early 2002, though. Or maybe it was and time flies when you’re having fun. Can you find it?
Okay. I’ll take one more (probably futile) attempt to explain this to you.
The right to own what you create is fundamental, and makes the creation of all but the most trivial forms of art possible. Without that right, there would still be some authors producing books, but without income, they wouldn’t be able to pay for professional editing, fact-checking, proofreading, illustration, copyediting, cover design, indexing, printing, or marketing. Each book would be an unverified self-published overpriced (no high-volume price breaks in the printing!) garage-shop product, with the author scrambling like mad to sell as many as possible before the guy down the street photocopied it and distributed it for a buck a copy less, or simply made an electronic copy and distributed it for free.
What would happen to music? If musicians didn’t own what they created, would we have professionally-produced CDs available? Without the economic incentive to hire a studio, session players, and pros to do the editing and mixing, we’d have low-quality garage-band CDs made with $99 K-Mart mixers and $19 Shure microphones. The musicians simply wouldn’t be able to justify paying for good equipment, except for what they used in live performances. That world would change completely, too. Since musicians could play anyone’s music without paying for it, the only ones that would succeed on stage would be the great performers. The great songwriters would be screwed. Why even bother to write a song?
I could continue this into sculpture, painting, poetry, software design or any other creative art form you name. “Software design?” I hear you cry. “That doesn’t run on a royalty basis.” Quite true, but what company would consider paying a stable of programmers to write code that the company didn’t own? Yeah, feel free to bring up open source, but how many programmers can actually make a living producing commercial-quality products without getting a salary?
The right to own what you create is fundamental and necessary for the proliferation of the arts. Everyone else in the thread can argue about the term of copyright or the appropriateness of DRM, and I’ll happily listen; but as long as you deny the concept of intellectual property rights I can’t help but see you as a petulant child that wants what he wants right now without considering the consequences of his actions.
When you make 30 copies of a CD (or magazine article, or painting, or whatever) to pass around to your friends, you have stolen something. Play the semantic game all you want–you have hurt the original creator of that work either directly or indirectly, and that’s wrong both morally and legally.
Oh, that would be just like the days before copyright laws… when Leonardo, the greatest con artist of all time, convinced people he was a genius. Dude, that would so rule.
I think you’re being just a little pessimistic. To quote probably the most brilliant man who ever lived: “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources”.
And don’t trust an artist driven by money. Up until the last century, nearly all of them has been miserable and poor. And now that they’re not… well, so much for contemporary “art”.
Parodies are usually deemed not to violate copyright laws. Of course, there are probably about 27,000,000 pages of case law that explain when, how and why, but, parodies are usually protected.
Er, you’re going to have to explain this a little better. As far as I can tell, they’re both things I hypothetically want but am not willing to pay asking price for. I don’t see a basis for your claim that I want one but don’t want the other.
What’s the difference between the Italian meal, which I would like to have but am not willing to pay $13 for, and a copy of an album, which I would like to listen to but, again, am not willing to pay $13 for? I’m able to get one for less than asking price, and I have to do without the other, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want them both.
What an ignorant statement. I could list a dozen or more albums I’ve bought precisely because of P2P, and so can many, if not most, people who download a significant amount of music. I’m sure you’ve seen the threads where they’ve done just that, and read the studies discussed therein where X percentage of P2P users reported buying more music, etc. You’re going to have to do better than ignoring all that evidence just because you don’t trust anything file sharers say.
I’m not saying it necessarily balances out overall (though the overall sales figures hint that it does), but you can’t honestly deny that there are individuals who end up buying more, not less, because of unauthorized copying.
Can’t say I’ve ever seen them.
I’m not. I just don’t consider it a “loss” when changing market conditions make it difficult to sell something at the price you’d like to sell it at.
There are many ways one’s commercial position might be damaged in that sense, but if we consider all of them financial losses and move to outlaw them, pretty soon we won’t be able to do anything without permission from everyone who owns any sort of property. IOW, making it harder for someone to sell something at his preferred price isn’t inherently bad.
For example, take any other kind of competition. Say that for some reason, the Toyota Corolla becomes a collector’s item, and I have the only one in town that’s for sale. I might be able to sell it for $15,000, well over what I paid for it. But if a few other Corolla owners take a look at the market and decide to sell theirs too, I’ll have to lower my price. My property is now worth less than it was before they started competing with me, but although that’s unfortunate for me, we’d probably consider it a good thing overall.
A similar thing happens if I buy an Xbox 360 on eBay the day after it’s released. Since so few are available, I have to pay $600, but I might be able to resell it for $800 if I act quickly. I don’t act quickly, however, and two weeks later, when all the stores have them in stock, the price is down to $400. I can blame Microsoft or the other sellers for devaluing my property by putting more on the market, but it’d be foolish to claim they took anything from me.
Obsolescence is another example. I buy a top of the line video card for $500, figuring that if I get bored with it, I can resell it for at least $400. Six months later, a few faster cards have been released, and no one will pay more than $200 for mine. The manufacturers are largely responsible for the drop in my property’s market value, but they haven’t taken anything from me, and they certainly shouldn’t let my concerns about resale value stop them from coming out with new products.
Yet another example is the availability of alternatives. If I’m selling WiFi antennas for $100 each, and someone discovers a way to make antennas that are nearly as good out of Pringles cans for $5, I’m going to have a hard time selling mine for $100. My inventory is now worth less because some know-it-all opened his big mouth. I don’t get to slam his mouth shut just to maintain the value of my antennas, though, and once again, it’d be hard to claim that I’ve really lost anything. I still have all the things I had before; the only difference is people aren’t willing to pay as much for them.
I understand what you’re saying, but I just don’t agree. Sorry. I don’t think putting effort into something necessarily grants any kind of ownership over it, and while it’s nice to have a lot of art available for purchase, I don’t think that’s an important enough goal to change the fundamental basis of ownership.
Let me ask you this: does your barber own your haircut?
That’s why I suggest artists and authors seek to get paid for working, not for making copies. There will always be someone who can print a copy of a book more cheaply than you can, but there will never be someone who has the same ability as you to write it in the first place. If that talent is valuable, then someone will be willing to pay you to exercise it - probably the same people who would’ve bought your copies anyway.
Man, what a conundrum. If only there were people who valued the existence of good songs, maybe there’d be some way for those people to provide an incentive to songwriters.
Like, maybe if there were some sort of… I don’t know, maybe little slips of paper? Or linen? The people who liked having well-written songs, or the musicians who liked performing them, could give those little slips to the songwriters to show their gratitude for past writing and provide an incentive for future writing. But I guess that wouldn’t solve everything… even songwriters need to pay rent, after all, and you can hardly pay rent with pieces of paper. We’d basically have to convince everyone else in the country to accept those in exchange for goods and services, and there’s no way we’d ever get 300 million people to do that. Sorry, you’re right, it’s a pipe dream.
But wait, what if there were some way for a songwriter to also perform music too! If his songs were better than other performers’, people would go to his concerts instead of those other concerts, right? Er… never mind, that couldn’t work either. You can’t exactly use a pen and play the guitar at the same time, and you certainly can’t sing a song while you’re still in the process of writing it. Damn, another dead end.
Funny that you’d mention this, because I am a programmer whose income doesn’t depend on selling copies. The software I write is useless without the hardware my coworkers manufacture.
Of course, that model doesn’t work for everyone, but there will always be plenty of drivers and machinery control programs, even in a world without copyright.
Speaking of open source, though, there are programmers who get paid for working on open source software. It’s exactly the model that I proposed: someone, often a company but sometimes an individual, wants to see feature X in program Y, so they pay a programmer to add it. They’re not paying for a copy of the upgraded software, or to have exclusive rights to the upgrade; they’re paying to live in a world where that upgrade exists and is available to them and others, and that’s important enough to them to spend money.
That’s essentially how I see the folks who want to limit my speech to protect their own business models, so I guess we’re even. (Well, actually, they’re petulant children chomping on cigars and wearing pinstripe suits while shouting into giant 1980s cell phones, but close enough.)
Yawn. That “hurts” the creator in exactly the same scare-quote-worthy sense that I could also “hurt” him by convincing 30 of my friends to come to the movies with me instead of buying that CD. The only harm is that some people keep their money in their pockets (or spend it on something else) instead of giving it to him. He seems like a bit of a greedy prick if he’s getting attached to money that isn’t even his.
If you want to play games and call that harm, have a blast, but I’m not going to play along, and I hope you recognize that it pales next to all the forms of real harm out there.
I searched for old posts written by myself with the keyword copyright, and then old posts written by you with the keyword Mr2001. This thread from last February was in both lists, and it’s the longest one at six pages:
You don’t understand the difference between just taking something because you don’t want to pay for it, and deciding you’ll have to go without something because you don’t want to pay for it?
