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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

Because lighting your candle from mine doesn't diminish my candle's brightness.

We grant limited monopolies on created works to incentivize the creation of the works, but that's it. There's no deeper moral grounding. Words you put out into the world don't belong to you anymore; they created impressions in the minds of other people and those impressions belong to those other people, by natural right.

You're right that it's just as sound a property right as every other, but it's one that cuts remarkably against the grain of the underlying natural rights (for a specific perceived societal benefit), and it should always be evaluated as such.

Every generation should be asking "Does the current copyright regime create more good than harm?" And every generation should correct if the answer is 'no.'

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> Because lighting your candle from mine doesn't diminish my candle's brightness.

So are you saying authors don't deserve any compensation for their work unless they produce books in physical form?

So you are saying people don’t deserve the right to build on public ideas without, ultimately, having armed men use violence to take money from them or forbidding them altogether?

Because remember when you say an author “deserves” to be paid you are saying the state should use its monopoly on violence to make that happen.

Perhaps it’s best not to use straw men and loaded terms designed to emotionally appeal to five year olds when discussing enclosure of the intellectual commons?

> Because remember when you say an author “deserves” to be paid you are saying the state should use its monopoly on violence to make that happen

Yes, that's how property rights - and in fact all rights afforded through civilized society - are enforced. If you have a problem with that take it up with literally the entirety of recorded human history.

That is an hilariously authoritarian view and wrong to boot.

You are confusing rights that are created by the threat of violence, such as copyright, and rights that are protected by the threat of violence, such as the right to not be killed for no reason.

Needless to say there is no inherent right for an author to profit from copyright. It is a wholly constructed right. They do not "deserve" it. Perhaps a society chooses to organize itself that way and perhaps it doesn't. On the other hand, innocent people really do deserve to not get murdered.

Am I understanding correctly that your position is that the enforcement of property rights is authoritarian? Or is your position that copyright is not a form of property rights, and thus authoritarian?

For the vast majority of recorded human history there was no copyright. We have records of Roman senators semi-complaining about how rude an acquaintance who wouldn't let them copy their book (not a book they had written, a book they had come into possession of a copy of) was.

Yes, I was referring to the OP's quote about armed men enforcing the law, not copyright.

Armed men have never enforced that everyone gets what they deserve. Not even close. They enforce those laws that we have decided they should. It's a huge leap from saying that someone deserves something to saying that society's armed men should take that something from other people and give it to them.

Value and labor are divorced from each other in this world.

I don't much care to get into who deserves what when we're talking about a property right constructed to create general societal benefit. I will instead observe that you haven't gone after anybody at Hacker News for the money they're not paying you to write comments.

Do you think you deserve compensation for these writings? Why not?

They absolutely deserve compensation, just not nearly as much as they think they do.

I believe most authors do not earn out their advance of $5k - $10k. I'm not sure how long it takes to write a book, but I'd be willing to be that ends up being less than minimum wage. If you enjoy reading, but don't think they deserve even that amount, well...

That's a pretty good argument against copyright. Is it really worth losing the cultural intellectual commons so that the average author (nearly all authors, in fact) can make well below minimum wage? I'm unconvinced about that being a societally beneficial trade-off.

> minimum wage. If you enjoy reading, but don't think they deserve even that amount, well...

I think they shouldn't be attached to that old business model in a world where self-publishing is possible.

I also think generous UBI should exist, but I guess that's another issue.

And that's the thing. One could make the case that in a world of UBI, copyright diminishes in relevance. If the intent of copyright is to allow people to use capitalism to create wealth via their words so that they can live a "life of the mind" and pursue grand ideas... If UBI gets us the same goal then that does something to the good/harm balance of the temporary monopoly on ideas.

The key point is remembering that copyright isn't some divine right stemming from the muses blessing the author with their own exclusively-owned words; it's a right societies fabricate because we believe it will incentivize people to build new knowledge that eventually benefits everyone. It's that incentivization that's the goal.

I think we probably agree with each other. Even with UBI, I do think it makes sense to have some degree of copyright. Just to allow creatives room to breath and tell stories they want to tell without their narratives by more popular forks. That argument is a different issue altogether, though, I think, and we are nowhere near being in a context where we need to figure it out.

I do think UBI should be a minimum, and people should still receive compensation for work they produce that people enjoy. Just not exclusive rights and perpetual royalties and all this nonsense.

Is the amount that they deserve a function of the medium of the work?

I'm sure someone great at math could come up with a function. Although I'd think it's more to do with the popularity and amount of times a work is consumed, while accounting for people consuming it for free.

>Words you put out into the world don't belong to you anymore

Literally everyone from the richest of commercial interests to the kumbaya-est of libre interests will disagree.

And in the context of natural rights, they'd be wrong.

Natural rights are fairly easily thumbnail-sketched by "What are your rights if you're on a desert island?" Out of the context of any preexisting society, what rights would you have?

On a desert island, if I find some words scrawled ten feet high on a cliffside, I may do with the ideas in those words what I will: copy them, change them 'round, claim they came from me, claim they came from god. Similarly if I hear some mountain hermit shouting them from their cave. The natural rights as apply to ideas are very, very liberal. We in modern societies (and only recently) have taken up the experiment of constraining those rights with temporarily and contextual monopolies to incentivize creation of more ideas via property law. This works, but in a clunky, hackish way; it is a strange kind of "theft" that leaves us with more of something than when we started.

And like all good wild hacks, it deserves to be considered for refactoring frequently.

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