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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

> the absence of a copyright

Ain't no such thing.

It's different from trademark, in that practical applications, enforcement, registration, etc., does not invalidate the copyright.

Registering a copyright doesn't create the copyright. It simply makes it easier to go after those that disrespect it.

I'm pretty sure that the only way to truly transfer the ownership of copyright of a work, is to have agreements in place, before it is created (like "work for hire" contracts).

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As a creator you can also explicitly dedicate a piece of work to the public domain, thus relinquishing any copy right to it. That’s what licenses like CC0, WTFPL, and The Unlicense do.

However, even being in the public domain does not in itself mean you can do everything. For example, in France you still have to respect the “moral rights” of the author, meaning you have to include their name and original title.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_France#The_pu...

The "moral rights" in France and Germany, or the "Urheberrecht" in Germany and Austria and others in Europe prohibit even the creator to put things in the "public domain" to the full extend. There are pro and con debates about this, of course.

Even photos of works in the "public domain" might be protected again, e.g. read about the (in)famous Wikimedia Lawsuit from the German https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiss_Engelhorn_Museum

There is such thing. There are three main ways for work to be public domain.

- Expiry of copyright.

- Explicit dedicated to the public domain by the copyright holder.

- Non-copyrightable work (such as computer or animal generated work).

In the case of the first two, the copyright actually exists, but is unenforceable.

In the last one, copyright doesn’t exist, because it can’t, so the point is moot.

> animal generated work

Actually, didn’t that monkey get copyright of the image? I can’t remember, for sure.

We can’t actually transfer the copyright, itself; only the rights to adapt and/or reproduce.

UPDATE:

In the "monkey selfie" case, the monkey lost, and lost hard. Probably because PETA behaved like ... PETA ... They footgun themselves constantly, by acting way too extreme.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

Ontologically, copyright doesn't exist. Copyright is an epistemology.

If copyright could exist, then a copyright for the copyright must be able to exist, and it'd be turtles all the way down.

This is not nitpicking. Copyright, as intellectual property, is entirely made up as all other intellectual property is.

Saying copyright exists is as laughable as saying intellectual property is as non rivalrous as the chair you sit in.

Man, this is some weapons-grade hair-splitting. I tip my hat to you, sir.

Still. People have gone to jail for copyright infringement, so I doubt at least they would feel like laughing at the idea that copyright exists.

Who has gotten jail or prison time for copyright violations in recent times?

I’m aware of recent cases in Canada where defendants chose to ignore a court ruling and attempt to republish very similar material as what the court had originally found them to be in copyright violation for. They were then found to be in contempt of the court which is a criminal offence and then ordered to complete jail time and pay substantial fines.

Copyright violations are not criminal offences in countries I’m aware of. Please tell me of any cases where a copyright violator faced jail time for the copyright violation and not for related criminal offences.

> Swedish prosecutors filed charges on 31 January 2008 against Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and Peter Sunde, who ran the site; and Carl Lundström, a Swedish businessman who through his businesses sold services to the site. The prosecutor claimed the four worked together to administer, host, and develop the site and thereby facilitated other people's breach of copyright law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay_trial

Swedish law has only gotten more strict since 2008 with regard to copyright.

What is it with this new ontological wave on the Interwebs? For a mathematical axiom, do you need another axiom that tells us that the first one exists? And so forth?

How would you prove the existence of the universe? Do we not need a bigger universe that contains ours? And so forth? (Don't mention the big bang, which is a bunch of non-falsifiable formulas.)

I am not sure what you are getting at, all property rights are made up agreements, as is what is defined as property, what can be privatized and what rights that affords you.

Take tangible land, your exclusive use of it has boundaries, for example airspace rights or mineral rights. It is all made up.

The difference is tangible v intangible, but in either case the rights are made up.

narrator: the courts were not kind to the sophomore philosophy student whose defence was the non-existence of laws

Good to see Terrance Howard is back after his brief hiatus

>Ontologically, copyright doesn't exist. Copyright is an epistemology.

You keep using these words, ontology and epistemology. I don't think they mean what you think they mean.

>If copyright could exist, then a copyright for the copyright must be able to exist, and it'd be turtles all the way down

This doesn't make any sense.

First, not all things that exist are covered by copyright or have a copyright about them existing (air exists, but doesn't have a copyright. Neither do slugs, pebbles, Uranus, and other existing things).

Copyright is just sets of laws dictating ability to copy, distribute, and so on. It doesn't need a copyright for itself, and even if it did, the regular terms for reproducing any other legal code would suffice.

>Copyright, as intellectual property, is entirely made up as all other intellectual property is.

All human laws and conventions are made up. Doesn't mean anything - copyright is still enforceable with very real prison buildings, cells, and bars - and if resisting arrest for it, very tangible police battons, tasers, and bullets are not out of question either.

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