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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

Copyright isn't a normal, naturally-occurring thing. It's an artificial construct made to incentivize people to make more things. So people aren't going to understand it instinctively. You have to explain it to them from scratch, show them the difference it makes, and show them their place in the system:

If you want to incentivize creators, you shouldn't copy their stuff.

That's the message that never got communicated to these "kids".

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Or, these "kids" understands copyright and did some economical analysis and figured out that the increased spending power that comes from the money saved by copying content at zero cost was more beneficial to the economy than any benefits gained by having content protectionism.

As the creator of intellectual property, my first priority is putting food on the table. The macro-economic benefit of trading my intellectual property is irrelevant to me.

Or, these "kids" figured out the message is a lie.

> If you want to incentivize creators, you shouldn't copy their stuff.

They do not have the legal possibility to not want to incentivize creators. In practice, they also do not have a possibility to even vote on this, and they know that basically never anyone has voted on copyright but the companies profiting from copyright. It is like a purchased law totally shielded off from democracy.

A lot of people disagree with you. When talking to folk in their 50's (I'm in my 20's) about this stuff, I often hear how intuitive it is that both copyright owners and patent owners should be paid for their work. Not just to create incentives, but because it's just in the absence of law.

It may be true, but I'm inclined to think that they just got used to things being that way, so it feels normal to them.

Of course they should be paid for their work. But that doesn't mean that they should be able to restrict distribution. Thomas Jefferson argued that copyright protections are not natural, and in fact the US law specifically puts limits on which rights copyright holders can claim, and for how many years. http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12....

But why shouldn't you remix and derive their stuff?

Putting all of Pulp Fiction on YouTube hardly counts as a remix.

It does if you reorder the scenes in chronological order.

Oops, you're right, I didn't read the OP carefully and forgot that Pulp Fiction isn't originally in chronological order.

Putting it in a different order does count. The problem there is that you can experience the remix instead of the original, essentially replacing it. So it's on the border.

But most of other cases are when derived product can't replace the original. In this case, we should adamantly demand that the creation of derived work is by default allowed, or else we lose all creative work that could be derived from original, which is a very bad thing in the same moral system where you operate.

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