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Comment by wazoox | Hacker News Reader

34 years after Bill Gates' open letter to the "pirates" and decades of heavy propaganda and legal actions from the BSA, RIAA, etc, the general public still isn't convinced that copying bits is wrong. If after decades trying you can't change people minds, it must be that you're wrong and they're right. Intellectual Property must die.

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And the South would still have slavery.

You need to ask the supposed victims of said crime, not the beneficiaries of it.

right, and the victim has generally been labels/publishers and not producers. producers, people who produce wealth. we're witnessing the death of a certain class of middlemen who are no longer necessary, not the death of the production of art.

You don't think getting rid of all IP would hurt producers?

It's unclear to me how one would make any money with movies and books when anyone can replace my name and give it away as theirs.

> when anyone can replace my name and give it away as theirs.

Nobody in their right mind ever pretended this is the way to go. However patents, DRMs and artificial limitations on the diffusion of digital goods do way more harm than good.

Sorry, someone had mentioned getting rid of all IP protection, and I mixed it up with the actual article.

I have no problem with ending patents... across the board. Although I'd like to see a change in copyright law too. One that works better for compa ies and consumers.

because that would be fraud.

Is it fraud if there's no intellectual property of any kind? If there's no intellectual property can't I rearrange the letters in any way I choose?

I can see how you would think that, since owning your reputation could be considered a form of intellectual property. but the two areas of law are separate.

author's rights / moral rights can subsist if copyright goes...

It's called a creative commons attribution license. Personally if we operated under the assumption of "once it's released, it's gonna get copied" then entertainment would be released in a completely different fashion.

The human history have always had some goods and services that everyone needs but no one wants to personally pay for e.g. history, archeology, free community park, national defense etc. How are these services supported? Either through patronage or government funding. I guess at some point in future we'll have to give music and movies the similar treatment.

http://mises.org/daily/1356

note that the other problems are microscopic next to national defense.

The problem with this attitude is that absolutely everyone, including the RIAA lawyers and Microsoft programmers, "pirated" and "stole" music, software and other digital "goods" at some point. I'd like to see someone who can rightfully pretend to be unilaterally a "victim". This is a fiction, like "digital piracy".

Unilateral victimhood seems like a high bar, unless your name is Jesus.

You forgot RMS.

I think that some degree of copyright protection for a person's intellectual works is fair and probably necessary within the current socio-economic system. A person should definitely have the right to profit from their hard work. However I don't think it's fair that an author can continue to receive revenue from a work 50 years after authoring it. It seems even less fair that the investors in large corporations like Microsoft can continue to profit from the intellectual work of that company's employees indefinitely.

It seems to me that a fair solution would be to maintain copyright but limit copyright protection to say 5 years. That should be enough for authors to obtain a reasonable revenue from their works while greatly improving the common good by eliminating artificial scarcity after a fairly short period of time.

Just because the public wants something doesn't make it right.

The reality is that this is exactly how we as a species define "right": we do what we want to do, and eventually we invent justifications and frameworks to make what we already do the "right" thing.

Eventually, when enough people don't want to do something anymore, that becomes "wrong."

I'm not saying this is how it should rightly be, I'm just saying this is how it is.

I bet you eat animals that have been tortured and killed in factory farms, and you have a bunch of a really great justifications for that. QED.

>I bet you eat animals that have been tortured and killed in factory farms, and you have a bunch of a really great justifications for that. QED.

As a vegetarian I feel that bringing out this argument (implying that a particular person is hypocritical -- and yes, I understand the societally-approved point), in response to a discussion on copyright patents, is below the standard of discussion I expect from HN. In general this discussion seems to include a lot of "no it isn't" / "yes it is" type bickering without much substance, and to be honest I blame the original article, which was content-free. Up above we have people arguing for the abolition of all intellectual property, and others claiming that mob rule is the basis for democracy. I don't see why the issue is such a binary one. Clearly the patent system needs reform. It's not at all clear that it needs to disappear entirely.

Will of the people, does that ring any bell? I'm pretty much sure that's what "democracy" means.

Notice that I don't pretend that the public opinion can't or shouldn't change. It did in the past, about slavery, colonialism, women rights, and many other matters. However I insist on the fact that after several decades of propaganda, legal battles and laws, the public still is unconvinced.

¨...a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest¨ -Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

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