To anyone interested in this matter, I recommend
Do Business without Intellectual Property - Stephan Kinsella http://www.stephankinsella.com/wp-content/uploads/publicatio..., a patent attorney who fights the very idea of IP.
EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers
181–190 of 275 posts
Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers
#182[I typed this up as a reply to a comment that has now been flagged. I think it's a conversation worth having, so I'm putting it at the top level instead.] I'd argue that "intellectual property" is fundamentally different from physical property, and can't really be "stolen" per se. If I steal your car, I have a car and you don't have a car. If I "steal" your book, we both have the book. I'm better off, and you're no w…
"If I steal your car, I have a car and you don't have a car. If I "steal" your book, we both have the book. I'm better off, and you're no worse off. In an "ideal" society, the free sharing of knowledge would be not just allowed, but encouraged." you are so wrong in this mentality. the bottom line is, that someone took the time and energy to write and publish that book to make money, so that person should be paid. wit…
>you are so wrong in this mentality. the bottom line is, that someone took the time and energy to write and publish that book to make money, so that person should be paid.
I took time and energy to write and "publish" this HN comment, and possibly provided utility for someone reading it. Where's my money?
Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Illegal does not equal immoral; copying does not equal stealing. Piracy of songs, movies, and applications actually improves sales, according to a study that the European Union funded and then tried to keep from getting published: https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-... The law shouldn't guarantee you a successful business model. If you believe in capitalism, this should be self-evident. If yo…
> Piracy of songs, movies, and applications actually improves sales, according to a study that the European Union funded and then tried to keep from getting published: I never understand this argument at all. Piracy of X improves sales of X is only relevant if you're keeping the business model of selling X . It's an argument for small amounts of piracy not substituting for market demand in a meaningful amount, and po…
If you remove the ability to sell things, there will be no sales for it to spur.
Books were sold long before intellectual property laws existed. Your argument is fallacious.
Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers
#184It's well established at this point that IA took a big misstep here and is too important and singular an entity to run afoul of current laws. To those who think IA is wrong not just tactically but morally on the basis of "violating the law", I'd like you to consider the following: Unjust laws exist. - Shall we be content to obey them? - Shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded? - Shall w…
Before we can answer those questions we have to decide whether copyright is unjust or not.
Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers
#185It's well established at this point that IA took a big misstep here and is too important and singular an entity to run afoul of current laws. To those who think IA is wrong not just tactically but morally on the basis of "violating the law", I'd like you to consider the following: Unjust laws exist. - Shall we be content to obey them? - Shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded? - Shall w…
You missed the step a lot of us believe this law is moral.
So this isn't about not following unmoral laws.
More so, on top of this, many people also think it's ok in some circumstance to break moral laws.
If someone steals food they need, then many people think that's ok. If someone breaks copyright when they wouldn't have normally payed for the product, then some people also think this is ok.
But I think this is none of the above.
This is a food bank openly stealing food from Walmart. Heck, if some anarchist group broke into Walmart and stole food, even that would have more support. But when they say what they are doing is ok and do it openly in front of police, that's when they lose me.
Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're assuming that Y is evenly distributed amongst all people, which is absolutely not the case. For example, I did most of my game pirating back in high school, when I didn't have a job (nor a car to get to a job and I lived out in the sticks) and had nothing but an allowance from my parents of ~$20 every month. So the maximum amount I could theoretically spend on games per year? $120. The retail value of all of t…
I'm not assuming that at all. My model is extremely simplified so it would fit into a comment, but it doesn't need to be that simple for the general idea to hold. Suppose you pirated a thousand games and would've legitimately purchased one. Your piracy then represents a theft of one game. Since there's no way to tell which one game you would've bought, we could simplify it to say that stole one one thousandth of a ga…
That's a lot of supposing.
Suppose instead if piracy wasn't an option the poster just played free games instead, or did something else with their time.
> but it's also probably not "buy zero games".
In this scenario, the poster may very well not have a credit card (because what's the point if you have no income, also a minor), so it might very we be the case he was physically unable to purchase these games online, especially in the era before online "gift cards" were a thing.
Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're assuming that Y is evenly distributed amongst all people, which is absolutely not the case. For example, I did most of my game pirating back in high school, when I didn't have a job (nor a car to get to a job and I lived out in the sticks) and had nothing but an allowance from my parents of ~$20 every month. So the maximum amount I could theoretically spend on games per year? $120. The retail value of all of t…
> So the probability of me paying for any significant portion of the games I pirated was effectively 0 It was literally 1 in 10. Which is a very long way from 0%.
Poster said in theory if he spent all his money he could pay for 10% of the games he pirated. It does not follow that he neccesarily would if piracy was not an option.
If i buy something for $0, and then later the cost goes up,it doesn't follow i would automatically buy it at an increased cost even if i can afford it.
Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fine, but there is nothing at all invalid about my argument, because all I argued is that infringing copyrights is defined as stealing property under US law. That's not even an argument; it's simply a statement of fact. Unless you're talking about my statement that musings about how it shouldn't be considered stealing are irrelevant to the fact that it is , which is also not an argument, just a statement of fact. (Th…
Your rhetoric tricks are a bit tiring. The question is not settled by saying that something is illegal. Of course book sharing is illegal under the current law, that's the whole point. The law in question is stupid. People who respect the concept of law and the importance of laws are outraged by this, and want to use the legal system to change this stupid law. Repeating that "book sharing is illegal" as you do leads…
> People who respect the concept of law and the importance of laws are outraged by this, and want to use the legal system to change this stupid law.
Some people. Other "people who respect the concept of law and the importance of laws" are outraged by the Internet Archive's infringement of copyright for no justifiable purpose and want to use the legal system to make sure copyright laws are followed. I don't know what you mean by rhetoric tricks. I've done nothing but explain the current status of copyright law. You're the one who resorted to some trick (which I still don't understand) comparing copyright to slavery. I agree this is tiresome, though.
Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what makes it not theft. Theft deprives the person of the original. If I have two books and you take one I have one book. If you buy one of my books and give it out, I did not have any of the books I had stolen from me.
Theft does deprive the victim of something. As I've written above, piracy is theft as it deprives the victim of potential sales.
Depriving someone of a potential sale is a weird definition of theft. Generalizing it seems like it would lead to problematic outcomes.
If a critic writes a negative book review, and people do not buy the book as a result, did the reviewer "steal" from the author?
Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers
#190[I typed this up as a reply to a comment that has now been flagged. I think it's a conversation worth having, so I'm putting it at the top level instead.] I'd argue that "intellectual property" is fundamentally different from physical property, and can't really be "stolen" per se. If I steal your car, I have a car and you don't have a car. If I "steal" your book, we both have the book. I'm better off, and you're no w…
Most people support copyright because they think content creators should be rewarded for their work. Unfortunately, the copyright laws that we have do much more than that, and that's a problem.
I support minimalist copyright laws, where for a set period of time (shorter than current copyright) an author/creator is the only person who can profit from work. For instance, an author publishes a book, and for 10 years is the only person able to sell copies, sell the manuscript to a publisher, etc.
But after 10 years, that book is essentially public knowledge. It's been out there, maybe some people have memorised portions of it, it's been read in a library far more times than it's been purchased, etc. At that point, I see no societal benefit to maintaining copyright. My own moral framework does not require an author to be rewarded indefinitely for their creative work (imagine if a builder and their estate received royalties every time somebody entered a building they constructed for 70 years? Absurd.)
I also have a huge problem with creative "rights". Take Harry Potter as an example. Everybody knows about Harry Potter, anybody could tell you the story, some people could probably reproduce a very rough abridged version from memory. It is part of our culture, cannon, consciousness, whatever. It's popular.
Now, if I want to make a Harry Potter game, or write a play, or do a live dramatisation, etc, I owe JK royalties. That to me is not fair. She has been rewarded for her work many times over. The ideas and the characters are now in everybody's minds. We know them. If I want to adapt them or discuss them through a creative work, I should be free to do so.
I often use the example of Ancient Greece to explain this. Almost all the written stories and poems we have from that time are simply written versions of stories told aurally. The Illyiyd as we have it is just one version that somebody wrote down of possibly hundreds of spoken versions that existed at the time. The Greek plays were part of their culture and were freely shared. Anybody could build on them, change them, and referencing them in new works was an honor to the original creator (if they were even known). It is very sad that the West has now favored infinite profit (I.E. copyright that lasts a lifetime) over the spreading of ideas and the sharing of common cultural references freely.