Hacker News Reader

Comment by jpalawaga | Hacker News Reader

you've created a very obvious category mistake in your final summary by confusing intellectual property--which can be copied at no penalty to an owner (except nebulous 'alternate universe' theories)--with actual property, and a farmer and his land, with a crop that cannot be enjoyed twice.

you're saying copying a book is worse than robbing a farmer of his food and/or livelihood, which cannot be replaced to duplicated. Meanwhile, someone who copies a book does not deprive the author of selling the book again (or a tasty proceedings from harvest).

I can't say I agree, for obvious reasons.

View on HN

With this special infinite-land-land though, what's special about the farmer's land is that he's expended energy to make it that way, just as the author has expended energy to find his text.

Just as the farmer obtains his livelihood from the investment-of-energy-to-raise-crops-to-energy cycle the author has his livelihood by the investment-of-energy-to-finding-a-useful-work-to-energy cycle.

So he is in fact robbed in a very similar way.

You're saying that a copy of a digital thing is the same as the "only" of a physical thing. But that's not true. You can't sell grain twice, but you can sell a movie many times (especially when you account for format changes, remasterings, platform locks, licensing for special usecases like remixing, broadcasts, etc).

You'd have to steal the author's ownership of the intellectual property in order for the comparison to be valid, just as you stole ownership of his crop.

Separately, there is a reason why theft and copyright infringement are two distinct concepts in law.

The difference here though is that the copyright holder sustains himself by the sales of his particular chosen text, so it doesn't matter that the text can be reproduced infinitely.

If you assume only way people are obtaining the media is by unlicensed reproduction, then it doesn’t matter.

Big if. Practically, the movie studios aren’t poor because their product has instances of infringement.

Many people who write books are small-time. Apparently the median total income of full-time book authors is 20k.

So the median person who is harmed when something competes with his book authorship is someone making 20k p.a., not someone who is a major shareholder of a big firm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com