Dan Bull: Censored By Copyright For Protesting Being Censored By Copyright

Right, but there was some resistance to "copyright" wasn't there? I mean, Thomas Jefferson was quite against it, on free speech grounds, and only agreed because of the "limited term" thing. Thankfully, Disney and other Immoral MegaCorps have found a way around the "limited term", and the US Supreme Court managed to find a way to agree with that hack, so we've now got "intellectual property" overriding free speech. How long can this go on?

Some of the authors of the constitution wanted to add the bill of rights when it was first passed. Others disagreed, and the compromise was to agree to add the bill of rights as a serious of amendments (individually ratified by the states) soon after. But note! The controversy was not whether those rights should be protected, or not. The debate was whether the rights had to be expressly written down, or whether they were obvious enough to go without saying. So the bill of rights was added later because it was considered unnecessary by many of the founders.

Copyright is not part of the constitution. That's flat out wrong.

What's part of the constitution is congress' ability to create copyright or patent laws. There's absolutely no imperative to have these laws, and as others have pointed out, there was opposition against this power from several founding fathers, including Thomas Jefferson.

It strikes me as either uninformed or dishonest to assert/imply that copyright is a constitutionally granted right.

I suspect the actual question should be,

"I mean, suppose I were to collect all of your Hacker News comments and publish them as "The Collected Works of imgabe" without your permission and without compensating you. Do you believe that should be protected as free speech?"

Dan Bull has built a business that depends on partnering with a business entity that is extremely nervous about DMCA violations. That doesn't give him extra protections against DMCA violations.

When Don Imus was suspended by his employer for talking about nappy-headed hos on national radio, it wasn't a violation of Imus's free speech rights.

YouTube channels seem designed more for people who want to make money from pageviews than for people who want to make righteous stands for free speech. It seems up until very recently he liked that arrangement, but now he finds out that there's no free lunch.

It's not preventing him from expressing his views. It's preventing him from using specific sequences of words, images, and/or music that have been used by other people before. He can still express the thoughts behind those in his own words if he wishes to do so.

If I want, I can write my own novel about cloning dinosaurs. I cannot simply reprint Jurassic Park without permission.

> would only Martin Luther King be allowed to express his opinion

If you want to recreate his entire speech (or mostly his speech), you would indeed need to get his permission. Or that of his estate.

If King wished to give his speech away, it was entirely his right and prerogative to do so. For the instances that I am aware of, he did not. In fact, King published and sold many of his speeches via vinyl record.

You are allowed to have your own opinions and talk about them. Pretending that seeding The Avengers is you expressing your opinion doesn't really fool anyone.