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Comment by hospitalJail | Hacker News Reader

Stuff like this is why I'm so allergic to law.

Imagine how much human resource is spent trying to preserve profits. Imagine your job is to be a lawyer that slows human progress for short term corporate profits. Imagine you are a judge who has to waste time on this case. Imagine you are a lawmaker and instead of fixing US medical, you are getting lunch with a lobbyist trying to make some variant of AI illegal.

All of those people have an existence that is bad for society. I imagine if you prioritize personal profits, its easy to do the job. Its much harder if your world view involves doing good things for society.

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Law is pretty vital to being able to have a planet with billions of people on it.

If for no other reason than people are really crafty and nearly optimal for wrecking up each other's business if they put their minds to it. Imagine how much human resource is spent trying to preserve profits... Now imagine how much would be spent on preserving anything without a legal system in place. "Nice house you have, hate to see anything happen to it" etc.

That is pretty disingenuous response IMO.

I'm clearly not talking about property rights or criminal law.

If you must, I agree with you. But that wasnt the intention of my comment.

But intellectual property rights are property rights (right there in the name; granted, it's a different kind of property, infinitely replicable, but it's still "intangible personal property," protected as such).

... and infringing a valid copyright willfully for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain is a criminal offense in the US (17 U.S.C. 506(A)). It's up to a felony violation.

You can, for personal reasons, assert there's a fundamental difference in kind (and you'd be joining an argument dating back past the founding of the U.S., an argument where Thomas Jefferson once said of protection of intellectual property that "other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society"), but in the sense that any law has any real meaning or force, it's exactly as much the law as the law against kicking you out of your own house because I like your house better.

> I'm clearly not talking about property rights

This is literally a property rights case, so if your comment wasn’t about property rights it was wildly out of context.

Is this really progress, or mere expropriation?

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