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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

In what way aren't they? "Free speech" as a right is intended to protect your ability to pronounce your original thoughts, which may be unpopular. It protects you from the government silencing you for political reasons. It does not:

1. Require other private citizens to listen to you, or agree with you

2. Require private corporations to broadcast your work or otherwise expend resources to make it available.

3. Give you free license to republish other people's work.

I mean, suppose I were to collect all of your Hacker News comments and publish them as "The Collected Works of Bediger4000" without your permission and without compensating you. Do you believe that should be protected as free speech?

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I don't see how getting Dan Bull to not express his views is not censorship. Perhaps not governmental (in the USA, in other countries, we have "Crown Copyright").

As far as my belief goes, yes, you (and whoever would like to) should collect all of my Hacker News comments, and republish them as widely as possible. I personally don't believe in the legitimacy of the concept of "intellectual property". Independent invention pretty much negates "intellectual property" in my viewpoint, but I also believe that the harm of keeping other people from doing things outweighs any benefits society (or individuals) get from squelching some arbitrary expression.

So, collect and publish away! I still have my ideas, and when you distribute them so will many, many others! We all win!

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?"

A flat "yes". I still stand by my rationale. imgabe didn't "steal" my ideas, I still have them. So do more people, now that the ideas got spread around. imgabe is more than welcome to go to the work of collecting, collating and publishing anything attributed to "bediger4000" on hacker news. The price to society is just too high otherwise. Also, maybe imgabe really did have those ideas, maybe I'm already just copying.

But also, what's the harm? imgabe will be discovered as a fraud, when he/she/it/them can't produce any more instantly viral, utterly quotable 3-sentence analyses of difficult situations. Or when someone tries to look up a phrase in Google.

imgabe is not bediger4000. I have a natural monopoly on the witticisms of bediger4000.

All good points. Especially, "The price to society is just too high otherwise."

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.

Requiring originality is far too restrictive. For example: would only Martin Luther King be allowed to express his opinion, and absolutely no-one else? No, that hardly sounds like freedom.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19, makes no mention of originality:

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

Intellectual monopoly seems inevitably basically in conflict with that. It is only possibly justifiable as a pragmatic exception.

> 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.

If King wished to give his speech away

I'm a little young to remember, but wouldn't most of the civil rights rallies been "open to the public"? Even if King gave away his opinions as a sermon to his church, I'd bet that attendance was open to anyone who cared to go.

Isn't public oratory (a.k.a. "speeches") the most flagrant manner of "giving his speech away"?

Shouldn't the question be reversed: if King wanted to sell his opinions, shouldn't he have avoided public oratory in which he gave away those opinions without getting an NDA or some other kind of license agreement with the attendees?

> Isn't public oratory (a.k.a. "speeches") the most flagrant manner of "giving his speech away"?

Are Paul Simon's songs in the public domain because he did a concert in Central Park? (No.)

"I Have a Dream" is definitely owned by King's estate. King actively registered the copyright on it. This wasn't an accident. There is no doubt he wanted to keep on owning it.

> "Free speech" as a right is intended to protect your ability to pronounce your original thoughts, which may be unpopular.

You're begging the question.

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