Comment by throw10920 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw10920 | Hacker News Reader

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> Let's take a second to remember

This is emotionally manipulative speech that provides no value to HN and only serves the purpose of bypassing peoples' logical reasoning circuits.

> ~every child doesn't have access to ~every book ever written

More manipulation - "think of the children!"

Copyright exists because people who produce content with low distribution costs (e.g. books) need some protection for their work being taken without compensation.

Fundamentally, you are never entitled to someone else's work.

There's already tens (hundreds?) of thousands of books in the public domain, and tens of thousands more under Creative Commons licenses (where the author explicitly released their work for free distribution). There's lectures on YouTube and MIT OpenCourseWare. There's full K-12 textbooks on OpenStax and Wikibooks. There's Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, the Internet Archive, and millions of small blogs and websites hosting content that is completely free.

There is no need for "a majority of the world had access to every book ever digitized" - and it's deeply morally wrong (theft-adjacent) to take someone else's work without compensating them on their terms.

> and it's deeply morally wrong (theft-adjacent) to take someone else's work without compensating them on their terms.

But I'm willing to bet that you don't believe this consistently across domains, and the domains in which you do believe it have been selected rather arbitrarily, not by you but rather by industry lobbying pressure.

Copyright doesn't exist for mathematics, jokes, fashion designs, architectural styles, recipes, and many other areas of human work. All of these represent similar creative work to the work done by musicians and writers. But we don't force comedians to license each others' jokes, or sue bars for letting people tell unlicensed jokes in public. And almost all of us wear clothing by uncompensated designers. And of course it would be unfathomably destructive to allow something analogous to copyright for a mathematical idea.

We also set limits on how long heirs can inherit copyright, which we don't do for other kinds of property, and we don't have any moral issues with that.

So it's important to remember that our moral intuitions about work and material products don't really translate to information and that we are truly making all of this up as we go along, under the intense corrupting pressure of a few very sophisticated industry lobbies.

You’re cherry picking a single line and deflecting with whataboutism. This is not benefitting HN.

Copyright is a system meant to ensure creators get compensated proportionally to the value they add to society

It is a bad system though. It restrains the society from benefitting from said work unless they meet certain terms (usually, payments). It's often times unrealistic to pay for all you'd like to consume. Especially that access to their work is usually badly quantised

(For example, I may want to search Sarah Silverman's book for a keyword, once. That'll cost me the same amount as someone reading the book from start to end. [please take this as an illustrative example and don't jump literally on ways to solve this exact problem])

I don't have a better solution yet, but I think we should definitely open up this discussion: can you come up with a system which compensates those who add value to society without restraining access to their products?

I'll go even further to say this is the fundamental issue in our society, way beyond copyright. That is, to find a way to compensate people for the value they add while eliminating the incentive to artificially limit access to resources needed by others

I'll be more concrete with another example. Take a limited resource: housing. In a society where you don't need to gain more because you're already justly compensated maximally for what you're worth, you don't need to own more than the house you live in. In other words, I'm advocating for a society where ownership is limited to what can be possibly consumed. Importantly, limited to no longer mean a way to extract value from artificially creating scarcity for others

I think this website has the best candidates capable of devising such a system. But we need to start by having conversations about the requirements for a better society

It will further need approval from society at large even if it's well defined, so the road is long. But we need to start somewhere, and that's requirements

Sorry I derailed a bit, but I think all this ties closely to the debate: 'is copyright a good system?' rephrased as 'if we want to achieve a goal, is limiting knowledge the best way to go?'. Which can be extrapolated to 'is artificially limiting access the best way to ensure those who produce value are equitably compensated for it?'

> Copyright is a system meant to ensure creators get compensated proportionally to the value they add to society

Compensation to the creators was merely a means to an end. Furthering progress was the goal:

> Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution. [The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

Well doesn't that just provide extreme support for the cause to reduce copy protection to ensure access for all who could benefit?

Yes

Depends on how you define "progress".

It's worth challenging the length of copyright. 20 years seems good enough for high tech R&D, probably good for books as well.

Sure! Yes! I agree! 100 years is way too long. 20 years is much more reasonable. But the comment that I was responding to (and many others in this thread) are advocating for the complete removal of copyright, and that's what I'm responding to.

Most book sales are done within 5 years. It's drips after that.

On top of that, knowledge moves too fast these days for a 20 year right to be useful for society.

100 years is arguably “unconstitutional.”

Constitution days “for a limited time”. Death of author + 99 is effectively unlimited to the perspective of typical human

Corporations have personhood in the USA, no?

For the life of a human, yes, for the life of a corporation, it's long but not too long. Specially for corporations such as Disney which are sure to last for quite a while.

Not saying this is a justificable position. I'm actually in favour of drastically reducing copyright (I believe 7 to 15 years might be a sweetspot). But a lot of laws are not made for regular human people any longer.

I was not advocating for the immediate complete removal; I acknowledged that this may be too disruptive.

I was simply reminding people what direction we should go in, and what the stakes are. Reducing copyright terms is a great solution, and yes something between 2 and 12 years is probably the right number to aim for as a first step. I agree with the above commenter that 20 is far too long, because 20-year-old material is slipping into irrelevance in many cases.

It's also good to remember that the only reason we have copyright (in the US, where "moral rights" are not a thing) is to stimulate the creation of more work. So we need to think about what configuration of copyright law actually stimulates more work, and we need to be willing to experiment.

Just to add: copyright is *not 100 years. It's 'the entire life of the author plus 70 years'.

If I make a YouTube video and live another 60 years, then people copying that video would still be committing copyright infringement in the year 2150.

That's just insane.

> Fundamentally, you are never entitled to someone else's work.

This is fair but incomplete, you are not entitled to compel someone to work.

But copyright is more, it controls what is done with the work after the author freely produces it and gives it to another. It is an artificial construct that we have created for good reason.

> it controls what is done with the work after the author freely produces it and gives it to another

No, not "gives" - sells. There's a transaction involved - and part of copyright law is preserving that transactional nature, such that person A doesn't sell their work exactly once to person B who proceeds to give it away for free to every other person on the planet.

The fact that the creator of a work sells it to one person does not give that person license to pirate it.

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