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Comment by eksemplar | Hacker News Reader

So do you and the content creator.

I mean, we've all laughed at the "you wouldn't steal a car" commercials, and the truth is, if you could download and 3D print a car, risk free, you probably would steal it.

The underlying social part of that statement is both true and interesting though. Because the reason you wouldn't steal a car is because of the social contract you have with other members of society. We don't steal from each other, and if we do, society punishes us.

That's basically what the EU is doing with this legislation, and sure, its annoying, but I have a hard time seeing how it's wrong.

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There is a very hard difference between stealing something from someone, which deprives them from having access to it, and copying it, which doesn't. The first one is considered morally wrong by everyone here, the second one is argued not to be.

> There is a very hard difference between stealing something from someone, which deprives them from having access to it, and copying it, which doesn't.

That's why I'm 100% in favor of counterfeiting money, since that has the same properties: no one is deprived of the money they already have.

> counterfeiting money

except counterfeit money can cause higher inflation. "Counterfeit" media doesn't.

Bad analogy, counterfeit money dilutes the value of all other outstanding money when it is spent.

I think it's worth being careful with your language, but then you are talking about whether or not it's okay to infringe on the rights of another and I don't think it's any easier to say it is.

Copyrights are not "rights" the way most other "rights" are understood. The term "right" in this context is an abstraction and it is becoming increasingly strained in the modern world. Copyright is a "right" the way that minerals rights are "rights" -- in reality it is a regulation on an industry.

You're right that there are a range of rights, but Copyright is very closely tied to the rights of speech and expression.

Usurping somebody's mineral rights sounds like straight up theft.

Copyright is tied to speech and expression the way speed limits are tied to driving: copyright is a restriction on what a person can say and how they can say it.

As for mineral rights, "theft" is not so clear at least based on the history of oil exploration. If I drill a well on my property to tap reserves that span the ground beneath both of our properties, is it really "theft" if I do not pay you a share? Historically the problem was that people were generally incentivized to drill their own land, which led to over-exploitation of petroleum reserves and giant messes in places like Los Angeles. Mineral rights were created to solve that problem by regulating the petroleum industry in a way that minimally disrupts property rights as they are generally understood.

In both cases there is nothing fundamental underlying the regulations. There would be nothing particularly wrong with a system that ignores the ownership of land above a petroleum reserve -- that is how air traffic is regulated in the US (nobody can demand compensation for the airplanes that fly over their property above a certain height). Copyright law has been changed many times since the Statute of Anne, and the original motivation for copyrights was to restore the publishing monopoly that had existed under a previous regulation system (the Licensing of the Press act, which was actually intended to enforce censorship). The rules are mostly arbitrary, and I would argue that in the case of copyright the goal of the regulation is also arbitrary (i.e. copyright was not established to solve an actual problem facing society).

Maybe if you're comparing piracy to stealing of personal goods, but if you steel a few gallons of milk from your local supermarket then you're not depriving them of selling that particular brand of milk either.

Digital products are easy to replicate, so they're obviously different, but that doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with them. Well you can, because it's extremely hard to regulate, but that frankly doesn't make it any better from a moral point of view.

> but if you steel a few gallons of milk from your local supermarket then you're not depriving them of selling that particular brand of milk either.

You've deprived them from selling those specific gallons of milk to someone else and caused them a direct monetary loss. Conflating that with brand is intellectually dishonest.

> but that doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with them. Well you can, because it's extremely hard to regulate, but that frankly doesn't make it any better from a moral point of view.

Yes it does, it's hard to regulate because it's stupid precisely because you haven't actually deprived them of anything which makes it morally not wrong.

I recommend reading this to learn why your milk analogy is off: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics)

> I mean, we've all laughed at the "you wouldn't steal a car" commercials, and the truth is, if you could download and 3D print a car, risk free, you probably would steal it.

The reason those commercials were funny is that they were a transparent attempt to pretend that copyright infringement was theft. It is not, either in law, or in effect. Copyright is a time-limited grant by a government over a category of items. It is not ownership of an item.

If someone could download and 3D print a car, the most important reason that they wouldn't steal it is that usage of the car would not be theft.

I can produce a copy of the contract I have with my employer that specifies my wages and other terms of my employment. If you believe I have a contract with some "content creator" then produce the contract, and show me where my signature was applied.

I am not claiming that the EU legislation is "wrong," I just want people to stop pretending that it is motivated by some high-minded ideal or that it addresses a fundamentally important issue for society. It is nothing more than a regulation imposed on one industry for the benefit of another industry. Copyright has always been about business interests, and the notion that a poor author somewhere is the real beneficiary of copyright is just a nice story publishers have told people since they started lobbying for the Statute of Anne.

> I mean, we've all laughed at the "you wouldn't steal a car" commercials, and the truth is, if you could download and 3D print a car, risk free, you probably would steal it.

Wouldn't it be awesome if we could just 3D print ourselves all kinds of nice things we'd like to have?

If we could actually pull off such utopia, why should society as a whole consider it acceptable to artificially restrict this capability?

When the legal situation around monopoly rights is holding us back, maybe the time is ripe to come up with a new social contract that is actually beneficial to society?

> if you could download and 3D print a car, risk free, you probably would steal it.

That wouldn't be theft, that would be making your own care. Theft necessarily involves depriving the person you stole something from of having it. It'd be theft if you downloaded the blueprint and then deleted it from their servers so you had the only remaining copy; that's theft. Copying is not theft.

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