NPR Intern Gets an Earful After Blogging About 11,000 Songs

I've argued that an inherent difference exists between copying something and taking the original. Your analogy discusses taking the original, and I've already agreed that taking the original does not seem acceptable; applying that analogy to information produces a useful approach to handling trade secrets and personal/private information.

However, you've provided no reason or rationale to treat copying something the same as taking the original. Your analogy does not cover that case, and your subsequent comments have not addressed it either.

Person A has a piece of data. Person A lets person B copy that data. What gives person C any particular right to complain?

Person A has a chair. Person A lets person B construct a copy of that chair. What gives person C any particular right to complain?

I view this as simple rent-seeking.

(The rest of this comment just responds to your specific complaint about "artificial", which seems like a side-track. The point above represents the fundamental point of my series of comments.)

> Your answer seems to be that the latter opportunity is "artificial", but here "artificial" seems to be a synonym for "pertaining to copyright". If that's the best you can do, I stand pat on my M&M analogy.

I've made the assumption here that you don't mind having a discussion about rights that does not assume the current state of law as having any particularly inherent claim to optimality. I don't want to privilege the hypothesis; I want to determine the optimal approach. Assuming the current state of law puts the burden of proof on anyone arguing to change it. Starting from nothing and arguing about what laws should exist puts the burden of proof on anyone wishing to construct a right where none inherently exists. Hence my use of the word "artificial": I don't intend it as a synonym for "pertaining to copyright"; I intended it as a label for a "right" that would have no particular reason to exist without the explicit construction of laws to enforce it.

I've also made the assumption here, based on your original analogy, that you already agree with the notion of property rights over physical property; I agree with that as well, so I've simply taken that as a given without exploring that issue further. I hope you agree that we don't need to explore that. You can either think of such rights as inherent, or think of them as artificial and assume that we agree on sufficient justification for them to exist. Either way works for the purposes of this discussion. I've stated this assumption explicitly to stave off any complaint you might have in response to my previous paragraph that "property rights are artificial too by that definition".

You also seem to believe that property rights extend to information, which I don't agree with, so that point I've explored quite extensively. I don't consider those rights inherent; I consider them artificial, and I don't believe they have sufficient justification to exist.

I refuse to assume the burden of proof here. You argue for copyright law, so you cannot assume copyright law when making your argument. Please actually argue for it. :)

I haven't attempted to argue whether the original author (note my not accepting the term "owner") will be worse off from the copying. I haven't fixated on that point at all; it never once entered into my reasoning. The original author is a third party to the transaction of copying; they have no standing to object. Party A has data; party A lets party B copy that data. Neither party is the original author, so the original author has no standing in the transaction.

Please do not assume that people who disagree with you must not have put enough thought into it. I have put a great deal of thought into my position on copyright, and I came to a different conclusion than you did. Your analogy provides no new information to lead to any different conclusion. I do not appreciate you dismissively lumping my arguments in with "every nerd ever" and assuming I have not put my own thought into the issue.

> By your own definition, the shopkeeper is "rent seeking" when he charges more than his cost basis for the M&Ms.

No, my own definition had absolutely nothing to do with the cost basis for M&Ms or any other physical product. Please don't attack a strawman. I defined rent-seeking the same way economists do, namely attempting to extract economic rent from a third-party transaction:

'Rent, by contrast with these two, is obtained when a third party deprives one party of access to otherwise accessible transaction opportunities, making nominally "consensual" transactions a rent-collection opportunity for the third party.' -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

That seems to describe copyright quite accurately, doesn't it?

We both obviously agree on about property rights over physical property. Thus, we both obviously agree that the owner of a bag of M&Ms has the right to charge whatever price they see fit, and nobody has the right to take that bag of M&Ms on terms the owner does not approve of. You keep bringing up your analogy, bringing up the obvious absurdity it implies about property, and then trying to jump from there to a conclusion about copying. We fundamentally disagree over whether an author has the right to control the copying of data. To accept your analogy as having any meaning in the context of copying data, I would have to accept the concept of copyright as a property right the author has over the copying of their data. Circular reasoning at its finest, disguised by way of an appealing-sounding analogy.

> Why do you accept one and not the other?

Why do you assume one implies the other? I have no particular reason to think of data as property, so I don't. Why should I believe otherwise?