Comment by greysphere | Hacker News Reader

Comment by greysphere | Hacker News Reader

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Honestly, it seems like if you accept any contract law you implicitly must accept copyright law. Consider the following contracts:

I agree to harvest your crops in exchange for 50% of the yield.

I agree to sing if you give me supper.

I agree to sing if you give me supper and not record me.

I agree to sing if you give me supper and subscribe to all the rules of copyright law.

I agree to sing if you give me supper and subscribe to all the rules of copyright law and all people in your jurisdiction also subscribe to copyright law. (And then some folks who wanted a singer got together and passed a law that satisfied the singer's requirements).

All these seem reasonable to extensions of the previous and it seems like we've ended up at the latter.

You might say 'well I didn't agree to that contract', but there are plenty of things in the world that we are bound by that individuals that we didn't explicitly agree to. I didn't explicitly agree to not dump motor oil in the ocean, or hunt deer on a certain day or that 50 decibels as the bound for noise during the night, or that children of age 12 can't vote, or that I have to wear pants in public.

You might argue that the last step is invalid, and instead the world should be a place where individuals can pick and choose which laws they are interested in subscribing too. I don't really want to put much effort into that path because my intuition is that's equivalent to anarchy, but maybe there's an alternate argument here.

So it seems to have a world w/o copyright law, you have to throw out contract law, or convince everyone to stop somewhere on that chain, perhaps not to make the contracts that mimic copyright law, or make a law making such contracts invalid. The later two options seem fairly artificial, impinging on folks self determination. So we're left with having to eliminate contract law, which seems pretty limiting.

> Am I physically touching your painting when I copy it? If not, then your attempt at equating physical property to thoughts is nonsense. We both believe in physical property, however arbitrarily invented it is. Only you believe in intellectual property, and I’m willing to bet you aren’t even consistent with it. Should you be fined for saving an NFT?

I want to hear you respond to this, as I'm about to respond to you. I see no reason to continue if you're just going to avoid anything I say while yourself trying everything to see what will stick.

It's not alien that I believe property excludes thoughts, as you're trying to make it seem. Most people agree with me, until it wouldn't benefit them to do so. Again, I demonstrate this with your presumed support of IP for artists and opposition to IP for NFTs. You would argue against IP for NFTs the same way I'm arguing against you right now, the only difference is that I'm consistent.

IP addresses are not property. Neither are trademarks. We can argue about the slightly related topic of whether they deserve government protections anyways, but it wouldn't be because they're property.

No, copyright and contract law have little to do with each other and you're making a giant leap of logic. Namely, I can find a way to obtain your copyrighted content without making any agreement with you, and still be held legally liable for it. Torrenting copyrighted content someone else broke the rules to seed is one such example. On the other hand, I can't be punished for listening to you sing for someone else in exchange for food, even if I didn't give you any food myself.

Yes there's plenty of things that we don't explicitly agree to and I'm in favour of keeping that list as short as possible. I don't agree that some of the things you listed should be implicit. Nobody is perfectly consistent, but at a baseline I'm far more consistent than you are.

Re nfts, I'm kinda not clear on the question, I think because we don't have a clear societal statement of what an nft is or is trying to accomplish. Literally what an nft is an entry containing with a url on a Blockchain with certain properties around non fungability. Saving that has almost no issue because distributing the bits in a blockchain is one of its fundamental purposes. Now saving the file referenced by the nft starts to become more interesting. My interpretation is that we should respect do whatever the rights holder wishes. If they want to allow saving, great, if not, then don't save. The problem seems to be the rights assignment of nfts aren't really communicated or standardized afaik. Some feel like the nft should represent the ownership rights of the work, some feel like they should represent the ownership rights of an instance which may or may not transfer the rights of the original owner. Some feel it should have nothing to do with rights transfer and instead just be it's own thing. Any of these stances (or others) are fine with me, and if any disallowed saving that seems totally fine. It would be nice if whatever scheme/contract was either standardized or easily identified for each work/nft. Images on the internet already have this problem and systems like creative commons attempt to help, something like nft-commons could really help make clear what rights are implied by the nft and thus which images referenced by nfts could be saved.

So re ipaddresses what characteristic differentiates the from property? For them to be useful it would seem they must have pretty much all the same characteristics.

I agree there could be a world where people could torrent whatever w/o repercussion, in the same way there could be a world where we didn't have to wear pants. It's not where we are, but we can imagine and reason about it.

But even in such a world, should a singer not be allowed to make a contract where they sing but won't be recorded, or a contract where they are recorded only if the folks follow copyright law? Effectively isn't this what many trade agreements are, one country will give another favorable trade conditions X in exchange for Y which includes 'your population can't torrent'. The country voluntarily does so because X is worth it. In fact elsewhere in this thread someone said exactly this happened in their country. Should this contract not be allowed, why not?

So I feel like even if you started in a world that allowed torrenting, if you allowed contract law, you would inevitably evolve to a world that disallowed torrenting, because that's a contract some people would want.

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