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Comment by d0lph | Hacker News Reader

Ok, what is the loss when I copy a file and give it to a friend? You haven't stated what the exact loss is. If your answer is that it deprives you of possible future profit, which seems like a bizarre thing to protect.

Obviously I meant unwillingly deprived, now you're just being pedantic.

But let's make your analogy more accurate, it would be more like me walking into your house, drawing it, and reproducing it at home.

> ... The law allows you to ...

You are in fact making the claim that something is (morally) wrong or not because it is illegal.

I will explain why competition doesn't count, because even though you make less money, they aren't directly taking it from you.

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The loss I've suffered is the loss of the right to attempt to sell your friend the file under the terms I want to set. I have the right to set those terms because I did the work of creating the artifact. You're completely allowed to find that a bizarre thing to protect, but you're not free to just declare that view the only reasonable one and expect no one to argue.

If I made my livelihood by designing homes, and I was good enough at that job that people demanded my services, then yes, copying one of my designs and distributing it without my consent is stealing something from me.

And I'm not conflating morally and legality. I'm really not. The two correlate pretty highly here (as most laws do for obvious reasons), so I guess maybe that's what's confusing you. But if I write a novel, and you put the original file on bittorrent, I created all the value here. You dragging a dropping a icon representing the bits on a hard drive isn't valuable work. And I believe that morally, the nearly infinitely greater amount of productive work I did to create that copy than what you did entitles me to more creative control. I believe that completely independently of whatever the legal system says. I also know that the legal system agrees with that determination and sets penalties for violating rules set up to enforce it. But I'm not using that as evidence for my moral position. It's not immoral because its illegal. The causation goes the other way around. It's illegal because the shared ethical framework of the people and society that drafted the constitution found it immoral.

> but you're not free to just declare that view the only reasonable one and expect no one to argue

To be fair, I believe I am free in my expectations and declarations. I didn't and don't expect that however.

> right to attempt to sell your friend the file under the terms I want to set

To attempt a sale is not a right, at least not one I am familiar with.

> You dragging a dropping a icon representing the bits on a hard drive isn't valuable work.

Actually, in as much as that is included in the archival process, I disagree.

> It's illegal because the shared ethical framework of the people and society that drafted the constitution found it immoral.

Good thing Disney has nothing to do with it, otherwise copyright might stretch out to over a century.

> To attempt a sale is not a right, at least not one I am familiar with.

It's called "copyright". You have the right to control distribution of your creative work. A direct and unavoidable implication of that is the right to try to sell it.

> Actually, in as much as that is included in the archival process, I disagree.

Archival doesn't produce a creative act by either common sense or legal interpretation. You can add value of course by writing backup programs or just doing the work of backing people's files up, so arguably I didn't choose my words carefully enough there. But the thing you created was the process of doing the archiving. You're entitled to control of and credit for that work, but not the actual files that your process created. Writing a program that saves the text of an ebook doesn't make me the author of the book.

> Good thing Disney has nothing to do with it, otherwise copyright might stretch out to over a century.

I completely agree, but it's irrelevant to the discussion of whether or not copyright as a concept should exist.

It's not exactly a basic human right, it still comes down to the fact that file sharing is not theft because there is no direct loss as a result of the sharing. A person could cause indirect loss as a result of many things, but it is not inherently wrong.

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