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Comment by seabee | Hacker News Reader

> OK, so how do writers make their living?

The glib answer is "most don't", and indeed you will find a lot of writers who have other jobs. Journalists are writers, and the relationship there is fairly clear. PR and marketing materials need writing too.

In short, you make your living by a company renting or commissioning your talents. Musicians had only one other option before recorded music - performing - and even then that wasn't always feasible. Think of classical music and its performance demands.

You joke about live readings, but the ancient poets did just that. They also complained of poverty. People really do suffer for their art.

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It's a basic right, if you spend a year writing a book, you are the one who have the rights to sell it and thus make money from your work. Same with software, a GPL license would be worthless without copyright.

You assume it to be, but that's the point of this discussion, it isn't or shouldn't be. If you spend a year doing something no one wants to pay for, you don't have a right to force them to.

Of course, but if no one wants to buy it no one is forced to either.

That's not the point; once released, why should people not be allowed to freely copy and share it? Why do you think you get to control what other people do with information?

It's not only about copying and sharing, but also who has the right to sell and distribute. If you create software, you are copyright owner of that software, which means I can not take it, sell it and take credit for it. I don't think I get to control what other people do with information, but you should have the right to control what others do with your work.

> If you create software, you are copyright owner of that software, which means I can not take it, sell it and take credit for it.

Ug.. it's pointless to state how things currently work in a meta discussion about whether the current method makes sense.

I'm asking you to justify copyright, not explain it. I repeat, why do you think you should get to control what other people do with information?

> I don't think I get to control what other people do with information, but you should have the right to control what others do with your work.

And I say you shouldn't, so justify your belief. You should be able to control yourself, that's it; not the products of your labor when copied. Information is not property, you don't have less of it if I copy it and you should have no say over me copying it regardless of who produced it.

As I said copying is only one part of copyright. If you spend a year in production and spending a large amount of money in the process. You should be the owner of the product, or anyone could just make a copy and sell it at a heavy discount with no associated costs of production.

The interesting thing is that the same argument can in fact be made for property. How can you claim to own something at all? It's related to labor, having spent x amount of time working to buy something.

> If you spend a year in production and spending a large amount of money in the process. You should be the owner of the product, or anyone could just make a copy and sell it at a heavy discount with no associated costs of production.

You're still assuming a world where copyright exists. Are you unable to think outside of those bounds? Do you not see that perhaps you wouldn't even attempt to do this in a world without copyright because you'd know up front you can't make money selling it?

> The interesting thing is that the same argument can in fact be made for property.

No it can't. Property is physical, if I steal your car, you no longer have it. If I copy your novel, you don't even know it happened. Physical property and intellectual property aren't at all the same.

> It's related to labor, having spent x amount of time working to buy something.

No, it really isn't.

You can copy my car if you want, if you steal my novel I don't have it anymore. But seriously, why do you think that physical things costs money at all? Is this an inherent property of something being physical, or is the cost related to salaries payed for processing and production? If everyone worked for free, nothing would cost money. Are you unable to think outside of those bounds? I'm not arguing for this mind you, but the decision to protect property or the notion of property as such, is arbitrary and a human convention at the core.

Still not an argument for why intellectual property should be allowed. Physical property is different, you can try and say it isn't all you want, but you're wrong, it is. I can't copy your car, I can copy your novel in milliseconds; these things are radically different. One deserves to be called property, one doesn't.

Sure you can, first you measure the parts then you manufacture identical parts and assemble a car that is a copy of mine. I wouldn't have any issues with this, but you would violate similar laws and the car manufacturer might sue you if you went on producing and selling that car.

Physical property is not different, your argument is: "it is" (in italic). But just to show you that a similar argument can be made that includes physical property I leave this Rousseau quote here.

"The first man who had fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody"

> Sure you can, first you measure the parts then you manufacture identical parts and assemble a car that is a copy of mine.

OK, if you're just going to be ignorant, goodbye.

It's a pretty common cause for law suits actually and is known as reverse-engineering. It touches on exactly what we are talking about here. You seem to believe that the inherent value of something is exclusively associated with the cost of the material, but of course it's not. Let me give you some examples. Dirt doesn't have any value to most people, but if someone creates pottery from it that people deem valuble, then it becomes a commodity that can be sold. The difference between the dirt and the pottery is the labor and the skill of the creator, that is what creates value. Similarly with a book, what creates it's value is not the paper or the ink but the narrative, it's what makes you pick one book over another or even an empty notebook.

You're still being ignorant or you're just really dense, in either case, I have no interest in continuing a conversation with someone who continually almost intentionally misses the point.

I'm providing arguments, all you are able to do at this point is to insult. Pathetic.

You're refusing to acknowledge the difference between intellectual property and physical property, something that everyone, including the law, acknowledges are different. That's not an argument, that's ignorance. As I already said earlier when you pulled this, goodbye.

The idea that it's unfair to take other people's ideas and works and use them as you like without their permission predates the idea of copyright.

That's not an argument.

>It's a basic right

Right now, it's a right, yes (what exactly does 'basic' mean?). The question is whether it should be.

>Same with software, a GPL license would be worthless without copyright.

The GPL is just an hack, using copyright to achieve a goal. If you were rewriting IP law, you could very well institute copyleft without copyright.

GPL is good, since it's up to the author to chose if he/she want's to license it under the terms of the license. It's the authors role of a copyright owner that makes this possible. Forcing everyone to share their work seems like a bigger violation than copyright. Lastly, a GPL license wouldn't be possible to enforce without copyright, or the concept of a copyright owner.

You wouldn't need to force - you could just give the author the right to demand that or not.

>Lastly, a GPL license wouldn't be possible to enforce without copyright, or the concept of a copyright owner.

Yes for the GPL, no for copyleft. The GPL was simply a mechanism that Stallman et all found to enable copyleft without having the power to rewrite the law.

If you did have the power to rewrite the law - and if you were to eliminate copyright, you would - it'd be perfectly possible to add a 'copyleft right' without relying on copyright.

The problem is that in Common law all those rights are based to the Copyright concept, and that blinds people to assume that must be. Here in Europe, we have 'authorship rights' - such as attribution - and they are not based on copyright; copyright is just one of them. You could take it out without affecting other authorship rights.

That's a non sequitur. Copyright does not grant you a living; it grants you the opportunity for one.

Few writers make a living from writing, not because they are denied the opportunity, but because not enough people are willing to pay for it, or even interested in it! The same is true with other artists.

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