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Comment by titanomachy | Hacker News Reader

You could argue that you never really owned the music. You owned a copy of it, but not the right to copy it.

Of course, this wasn't very enforceable in the era of cassette tapes and CDs, or even the era of hard-drives full of mp3s. And even just owning a copy was pretty nice, for example you could lend it to someone else, and sell or give it away when you were done with it.

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That's the point. You owned a copy. You could lend it, sell it. Nowadays when the content store you bought your content from is closed, your content is gone. You die? Your content is gone as well. Account gets banned for some reason? Content is gone. Furthermore, data about you consuming the content are sent to the store. I don't want any of that.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/08/first-sale-why-it-matt...

Makes sense. Copyright before digital goods seemed to strike a pretty acceptable balance. I can't mass-produce and sell a textbook that someone else owns the copyright to, but I can give it to my friend who's taking the class after me. The author makes a living, and purchasers gain a reasonable set of rights.

How do we get to a digital analogue of this? The physical-book copyright system probably wouldn't work well if everyone had a printing press and unlimited free paper, which is effectively what computers have given us.

Or maybe it would work fine. It's trivially easy (although maybe not legal) for me to download DRM-free copies of most ebooks that I want to read, and I still pay for them. Maybe enough people think that way that authors would still make a living.

> You owned a copy of it, but not the right to copy it.

In the US, the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 explicitly legalized personal and noncommercial copying (e.g. mix tapes) and established a tape tax to compensate record companies (!), musicians, songwriters, and music publishers.

Indeed "Rip. Mix. Burn." was Apple's slogan for iTunes in 2001, and it seems to have depended on the AHRA (and "music CD-R" media, which included the tape tax.)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple subsequently argued that iPods were exempt from the tape tax and made it hard to record music off of iPods onto other media. One could imagine an alternate world where Apple('s customers) paid the AHRA tape tax and Apple enabled easy "rip/mix/burn" across iPhones and other devices.

I think in an alternate world where Apple enabled easy rip/mix/burn we would end up in the same place we are now - with Spotify and other streaming services dominating.

There's an old idea that once you release something you have created into the wild it is no longer really yours, but ours. Copyright and IP have never really prevented artistic theft, just slowed the ability to make money using someone else's IP. However, when you consider things such as the success of "Old Country Road" where a core characteristic of the song was a sample not originated from the artist themself, you can see how copyright and IP law really don't mean anything in the world of art. Information still wants to be free

In a world that is rapidly changing into tightly controlled presentation channels, banning of not tightly controlled information sharing channels, and ubiquitous AI backed bots sifting through any exchange in search of even the most farfetched resemblance and where spurious strikes mean tried guilty and sentenced until proven innocent, that point of view might be a tad naive.

Information never wanted to be free. It has no will. The freedom was the result of many people willing to stand against its confinement.

"Artistic theft" isn't really ethically theft if someone has simply copied a work.

Imagine a small village. If John makes an axe, and Jim sees it and copies it, did Jim steal John's axe? Seems like there's only theft occurring if Jim claims to have designed it himself---stealing some of John's reputation as the designer and first maker of that kind of axe. Doesn't the whole village benefit from more abundant chopped wood? Or perhaps from cheaper lumber prices? True, John now has competition chopping wood, but perhaps he's got an advantage as a designer and he'll soon specialize as a carpenter or tool designer rather than just a wood chopper. Couldn't it be possible that copying ideas and attributing the persons who originate them enriches the entire village---including those who came up with the new ideas?

I find Christian philosopher Vern Poythress's ethical reasons why we should advocate for changing copyright laws to be insightful and persuasive... and I learned the axe inventor example from his article, https://frame-poythress.org/copyrights-and-copying-why-the-l....

Owned is the wrong word, then. Possessed is probably a better term.

In the US we have the first-sale doctrine. So you own your copy. You can sell your copy of a book or a CD, even though the publisher might like to prevent that.

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