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Comment by hxa7241 | Hacker News Reader

If you want to understand, you have to start by doing one thing: stop taking copyright for granted, and imagine it as not a fixture of reality, not like a basic law of physics -- because it isn't.

Copyright is a law we have made, and those who reject it see it as bad and unjustified. From a principled position it is basically immoral, and from a pragmatic position it is unproven by evidence.

From the anti position, all the notions of 'stealing', 'losses', 'will of the creator' no longer exist -- they are entirely dependent on accepting the copyright concept. If there is no copyright, there is no stealing, losses, or primacy of creator's will.

If a law is not justified and well-founded we really ought not to have it. Is that not important?

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That's a fair point. I suppose it relates to why people follow laws in general: is it because all laws we've adopted are good? Is it because laws, by virtue of being a law, are good? Is it because we are afraid of being punished for violating the law? These are major legal and political science debates (e.g. H.L.A Hart, Ronald Dworkin, etc.).

Anyhow, point being, although the law may be unjust, punishment for disobeying the law is not either unexpected or unfair. So while we can bemoan that people are punished for violating copyright law, that doesn't mean that they weren't justly punished by a government enforcing the law.

1) although the law may be unjust

2) that doesn't mean that they weren't justly punished

Didn't you equivocate on "justice" there?

If "justly" only means "legally", the second quote is right. There's a reason why the Department of Law-interpretation-and-enforcement is called "Department of Justice" instead. Lawyers love to think that they're administering justice and not simply a piece of legislation. But we should not fall for this linguistic trick and equivocate justice with what is legal.

Political philosophers often use the word "justice" or "fairness" to refer to some moral ideal that is above existing laws, and which we can appeal to in evaluating existing and proposed laws. There are disagreements about the content of this ideal, of course, but none of that makes the concept of justice less authoritative than positive law. On this definition, the first quote would stand, but the second quote wouldn't make much sense.

There's also a sizable literature on civil disobedience, whereby citizens are morally permitted -- or even required -- to disregard laws that they believe are grossly unfair or unjust (provided that certain other conditions are met). IIRC Dworkin wrote an article or two on this topic, and so did Rawls.

Sure--I don't disagree with you. I'm not suggesting that people shouldn't engage in civil disobedience, in fact, I personally think that people should engage in civil disobedience as often as they feel morally compelled to.

In my last statement (and setting aside the word "just"), I was putting forward the legal positivist (i.e. HLA Hart) viewpoint that laws are valid by virtue of being law (without getting into what "law" is and so on). Accepting that copyright law is therefore a valid law on this level, I don't find its enforcement invalid. This is separate from whether I find the law sensible, or morally reprehensible, or whatever--and, depending on my views on that issue, I might want to disobey it and be justified in doing so. But, even if I think the law is completely insane, that's not saying that I would think of it as some artificial concept that I might completely ignore and then be shocked at being prosecuting for violating it, as a I read a previous post to suggest. By rebelling against it I am tacitly acknowledging that the law is what it is, and I should be prepared to accept the punishments.

Apologies if I am being opaque, it's obviously a minor point that has no real bearing on how people actually act.

Oh, I see. I agree. I wouldn't be surprised that a government tried to enforce positive law, the same way I wouldn't be surprised if the Mafia trashed your store because you failed to pay for protection. Just because the powers that be are wrong doesn't mean that their threats are any less real. To disagree would be naive.

It's also great to meet someone who knows that legal positivism is not incompatible with the existence of valid but unjust laws. Seen too many first-time philosophy of law students who don't seem to understand this!

If you want to understand you have to start by doing one thing: stop taking copyright for granted, and imagine it as not a fixture of reality, not like a basic law of physics -- because it isn't.

Copyright is a law we have made, and those who reject it see it as bad and unjustified.

Who said it isn't "a law we have made"?

I surely did not. I would also drop the patronizing "If you want to understand" start.

I know fully well that copyright is not a physical law.

Access to free copies of things someone else created and sells is not a physical law either. It's something some people want.

I (and the law) happen to find the rights of the creators regarding the distribution and sale of their creation, to be more fundamental than the rights of people merely wanting to have those creations.

And, what I set up to do above is not prove that the copyright law is just or correct as it is, but that some arguments against it (those I examine) don't hold much water.

From a principled position it is basically immoral, and from a pragmatic position it is unproven by evidence

It's a law. It cannot be "unproved by evidence", because it does not make an observation to prove or disprove, but declares how some things are to work. Even a totally arbitrary law, like: "Every person wearing red should be jailed" cannot be "unproved by evidence".

As for the "basically immoral" you make it sound like a statement of fact. It is not. Lots of people, including legislators, don't see it as immoral.

If a law is not justified and well-founded we really ought not to have it. Is that not important?

Of course. But it must be proved that it's not justified. I don't see many arguments in your comment. You write, for example:

The same holds true for everything, even for murder. All the notions of murder being bad and illegal depend on the acceptance of the "life is a right" concept. Which is a societal concept, no much concern in raw nature about killing and eating other animals or even your own species.

> Access to free copies of things someone else created and sells is not a physical law either.

Well, this is the thing, it is pretty much a physical law. Information is nonrival: it is infinitely copyable and anyone can use it without reducing access to anyone else. The effort and work to produce information is a scarcity, but once the information is expressed and public it is an abundance.

The whole of the ethics and economics hinges upon this basic physical/logical structure. This is the fundamental fact of the matter, and if it is followed through rationally, all of the normally assumed ethics of copyright unravels.

Paying people for work done to create makes sense. It makes an 'economic' structure that mirrors the basic physical constraints. And it is justified according to its 'economic' effects. You give something up, you get something in return. The individual transaction is fair and square, and the global outcome is a gain from being able to 'move' things around.

None of that much holds for paying for copies. The transaction is not fair and square, it is an unwarranted and unjust restriction of personal freedom of those using the information. And as for the global gain, it seems rather lacking grounds of actual evidence.

> The same holds true for everything, even for murder.

No, there is something of a difference. Murder is outlawed not arbitrarily, but because it is something we do not, in a very basic way, want. It has a grounding in the physical facts of what the act does, and in the physical facts of our reaction to it (as a victim). That physicality gives it an unparalleled strength as something we all agree on.

Copyright has no such physical grounding. Would murder be just as wrong if it could be done without actually killing anyone? You do the same things, but the actual effect is not there? -- perhaps imagine it as a video-game. It is a very different thing. And this is like copying: on the fundamental level it is 'stealing' without the stealing (i.e. not really stealing at all) -- because the basic relation involved is abstract.

Etc.

The problem is that this "scarcity" (to produce information) wants to be compensated too. And it's not only "scarcity", it's also costly to produce information. The fact that you can make 1 billion copies of Adobe Photoshop for free, for example, does not mean Adobe Photoshop itself costs nothing. It costs something like several tens of millions to make in programmer's salaries. Those paying those millions should get to dictate how you pay for it, like the guy that makes a chair gets to dictate how you pay for his chair.

You seem to think that the scarcity of infomation production means nothing at all, when you say e.g.:

When you buy Photoshop, it's not just bytes downloaded to your PC you get, which cost nearly nothing (= your ISP bill), you ALSO get a slice of the paid, hard, work of hundreds of people in return.

Why are we confusing technological feasibility (free copies are feasible) what what ought to be done (compensate the creator or not)?

A crazy idea to directly make the software sale more akin to a specific item sale (a chair):

The software maker sets an arbitrary total aggregate expected sale price P and a selling goal (say, X units). Anyone buying before X units are sold pays P/X. For anyone buying after it, the price falls P/X+ (and the first buyers are also given their difference back, either directly or in "store credit"). In the end, if they sell a billion copies, people get the program for say a dollar, but it's OK, because the company is compensated. Actually, this makes popular items essentially free or dirt cheap in the end. For this to work, we need a marketplace like the Mac App Store, so those transactions and record-keeping can be automated.

This restricts the artificially huge profits made by controlling the price, and puts a set price to a free copyable item, like a tangible item has, that reflects the work that went into it. It also keeps the risk of the original sale, i.e if the sell < X, they have a loss.

Well, the global IP industry, sales of software, music, books, magazines, etc, is on the level of trillions of dollars. It would be almost zero with totally free copying. So, at the economic level, there is some support for "global gain". And it's not like the culture would be poorer if less Metallica and Lady Gaga albums where freely torrented (yes, I'm a snob like that ;-).

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