There Is Never a Need to Justify Sharing Culture and Knowledge
falkvinge.net
falkvinge.net
Practically any copyrighted material still being consumed after, say, 30 years is of significant cultural interest.
Is that really what scholars of behavioural economy and human psychology would tell us motivates makers to make things?
However, you're arguing that an artist has a "natural right" to their work, Forever. And that if it ever enters public domain and is used, it's users are thieves. (it's only possible to "take it" if copyright is considered a natural right)
No, I'm not.
Forever
Definitely not.
it's only possible to "take it" if copyright is considered a natural right
You can take something that is public property, like a flower from a national park.
But you should.
> when that "culture" is purely commercial.
You dont need a justification at all. You want to share with your fellow people, thats it. People love other people and love to share things they have with them. Sharing is caring. Suppressing that inherently human feeling and urge simply to make somebody make more money is insane.
The problem with the whole copyright debate is that the so called "democracy", aka will of the people, is completely and utterly disregarded. The process of law making is completely and utterly driven by special interests and enforced against all public resistence from top down. The issue of copyright is closed up in a dictatorship bubble and fiercely guarded against democracy.
The people, and _only_ the people (like in a direct referendum) should decide what they value more: their natural, human right to share useful information with their fellow humans, or to collectively enforce a kind of for-profit censorship in order to incentivize commercial production. No single authority should be able to make such a far-reaching and intrusive decision for them.
Such a referendum has never been held, and therefore such laws are undemocratic, and for that single reason alone I and a lot of other people do not feel obliged to obey copyright laws. It is as simple as that. Requirig people to obey and respect copyright restrictions simply because some special interest calls it a law makes as sense as requiring them to obey and respect ius primae noctis only because some special interest calls it a law. To be respected, a law has to be widely agreed upon, and copyright is as widely agreed upon as ius primae noctis.
Also, claiming the copyright regime is not the product of democracy is utterly ludicrous. If people cared so much about this "natural right to share" they would vote out the people who pass restrictive copyright legislation. But they don't. Claiming that the results of the democratic process are in fact not democratic for various hand-wavey reasons is the last-ditch argument of people who don't like the outcome of the democratic process because it didn't come out their way.
Also, the parent poster used the word "democratic" in its literal sense, not as a euphemism for "elected republic." No literal democratic process has ever been applied to US copyright law.
This is a contorted, disingenuous way of saying that people, in general, simply don't care about the issue.
I think most members of the public perceive "sharing" as "wrong," but in the same sense as they perceive double parking to be "wrong." Unusual cases aside, most peoples' everyday experience with copyright enforcement is their ISP sending them a "stop doing that" e-mail, which I think most people perceive as a slap on the wrist commensurate with the minor wrong they have committed. I think this is the most accurate characterization about how people feel about the copyright issue, and also explains why it's not an issue that gains any traction with voters.
I wouldn't be so sure. Here are two possible data points:
http://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/
and
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/the-generational-d...
That's the problem with a republic (where people elect representatives to do the voting for them): The people you elect don't always vote the way you want them to. You have to decide if e.g. a candidate's stance on tax reform outweighs his views on copyright reform. Instead of getting to vote on each law the way you want (as in a direct democracy), in a republic you always compromise your position on some issues in order to have a say in others.
With regards to the democracy issue, I'm not so sure.
For example, all the major copyright laws and amendments tend to get negotiated in secret between "industry" and the government (at least in NZ).
The NZ govt tried to bring in Bill 92A, ended up repealing it due to widespread protests. After things died down, they passed it (surprise!) "under urgency" in an emergency parliament session dealing with the Christchurch earthquake.
Also, politics suffers from "bundling". I can't unbundle a politician or party's stance on copyright infringement from their stance on say, social welfare or tax rates.
In NZ, both of the major parties supported Bill 92A, which makes "voting them out for it" very difficult.
But that's quite different from the assertion that the copyright issue is insulated from the democratic process.
I think this is subject to the same fallacy of the parent post. Even if most people have a desire to obtain intellectual privileges over their labour, that doesn't mean it's good for society as a whole to give it to them.
That is because they want credit for the idea. Give them credit and share it freely, and most people will not complain, even if they never intended for their ideas to be shared by millions of people (many will be happy with the fame, even if they don't see millions of dollars for it -- again, as long as they are getting credit, or at least as long as nobody else gets the credit).
Only people who want to exploit ideas for profit use terms like "intellectual property," because they are desperate to convince everyone else that ideas are a form of capital. The rest of us use words like "idea," "song," "movie," "book," "equation," "name," "DNA sequence," etc. to describe things that might be copyrighted, patented, trademarked, or whatever else. That is because the rest of us have not been brainwashed to the point of thinking that copying things is a destructive activity.
"Also, claiming the copyright regime is not the product of democracy is utterly ludicrous"
Yes, because as we all know, hundreds of millions of Americans care deeply about Sonny Bono's vision of lifelong copyrights and the end of the public domain; all that money donated by Hollywood and the recording industry, all their lobbying, all the revolving door politics, none of it had anything to do with the Mickey Mouse act, the DMCA, or TPP. No, this is all highly democratic -- we just heard Obama and Romney talking about the importance of ensuring that websites like Megaupload be removed from the Internet, and that programs like deCSS remain outside of America.
"If people cared so much about this"
People don't care; people ignore copyrights when they want to share things with each other, which is in no way a new situation. People were singing Happy Birthday at public events without giving a damn about the copyright status of that song. Copyrights are a regulation on industry, and it is absurd to try to apply copyrights to the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. The only reason copyrights became a major issue in the past 30 years is that the industries that depend on copyright to turn a profit discovered that they are no longer necessary, and so they tried to expand copyright to turn back the technological clock. We have seen this sort of laughably misguided behavior before, and thankfully we stopped the nonsense before ruining good things:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws
"Claiming that the results of the democratic process are in fact not democratic"
This is not democratic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bribery
It is, however, the way copyright expansions happen, at least according to one prominent insider:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/19/exclusive-hollywo...
It goes far beyond credit. Find a popular restaurant with an original shtick, set up a copy, and see if proper attribution changes the degree to which you've pissed off the owner of the original.
Do a thought experiment. Do you remember the episode of "Big Bang Theory" where Penny comes up with the idea to sell Penny Blossoms (little hair accessories)? See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF-0qn_-TAo
Imagine this hypothetical: someone else sees Penny Blossoms, copies the idea and the name, and makes a ton of money selling their copy mass-produced by Chinese labor. What is Penny's reaction in this hypothetical? Is she excited to see her ideas be disseminated, or pissed off that someone else is making money off her idea? Does attribution change that reaction?
> Only people who want to exploit ideas for profit use terms like "intellectual property"
"Intellectual property" exists because people believe, very strongly, in the right to profit from their own ideas to the exclusion of others. People perceive it as "unfair" when someone else makes money off their idea. The Apple versus Samsung case is a really great example. The case didn't happen because certain patents existed. The case happened because Samsung released products that looked a lot like iPhones, and Apple (Jobs) felt ripped off. If patents didn't form the basis of the suit, Apple would have found something else--the feeling of being ripped off came first, the law came after.
> That is because the rest of us have not been brainwashed to the point of thinking that copying things is a destructive activity.
You're wildly confused about whether the chicken or the egg came first. Perceptions about the protection of ideas predate "all that money donated by Hollywood and the recording industry, all their lobbying, all the revolving door politics..." Obviously copyright and patent date back to before the Constitution, but even in contexts where neither copyright nor patent apply, there has been a strong theme of people wanting to protect intangible property. Usually these come up in the context of "misappropriation" or "unfair competition." In many respects, the protection of ideas under the current law is much narrower than what people thought should be the case historically. It was popular (though never the law), for a long time, to appeal to a "labor theory of copyright" where people thought facts or news should be protectable if they took effort to collect or gather. There is a strong conceptual appeal to the idea that if one spends effort creating something, whether tangible or intangible, one owns and should be able to control it. It's a manifestation of our monkey selves.
Another good example is analyst stock recommendations/price targets. These are clearly facts/opinions and not protected by any intellectual property regime (an attempt to extend protection to them under a misappropriation theory was struck down by the Second Circuit recently). But even though the law doesn't protect these recommendations, people genuinely feel ripped off when aggregator sites repost analyst recommendations. They feel it is unfair that someone should be able to profit by simply reposting something that required them to undertake extensive research and analysis. It's very much a "there should be a law!" sort of feeling.
The first thing they would do is remind everyone that they had the original recipe, that they still make it the authentic way, and that the competition cannot get it right because they are just copying things. Surely you could have come up with a better example.
"The Apple versus Samsung case is a really great example. The case didn't happen because certain patents existed"
Yes it did, see above. Steve Jobs wanted to ensure that it was Apple filing patent lawsuits, rather than Apple being sued. Rounded rectangles are not an original idea. Apple is a profiteering corporation, no different than any other profiteering corporation:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/patent-wars-am...
Here is what Steve Jobs really felt: "Privately, Mr. Jobs gathered his senior managers. While Apple had long been adept at filing patents, when it came to the new iPhone, “we’re going to patent it all,” he declared," "“Even if we knew it wouldn’t get approved, we would file the application anyway,” the former Apple lawyer said in an interview. “If nothing else, it prevents another company from trying to patent the idea.”"
"Perceptions about the protection of ideas predate "all that money donated by Hollywood and the recording industry, all their lobbying, all the revolving door politics...""
Right, they can be traced all the way back to "that cozy relationship between printing press operators and the British government, with all their lobbying, and with the lack of protections on free speech." For what it's worth, the idea that sharing is good for humanity and that knowledge should be copied predates the notion of copyrights and patents by millennia: ancient libraries copied books frequently, without hesitation, and one point anyone who came to Alexandria with books was required to allow the books to be copied. Copyright was a product of industry from its very inception: first to ensure that only certain, government-approved printing presses could publish books, later to maintain the revenue stream of those presses (after intense lobbying following a period of no copyrights.
"there has been a strong theme of people wanting to protect intangible property"
Yes, but at one time it was considered to be the sort of thing that the aristocracy did to prevent the lower class from ever rising to power.
"Usually these come up in the context of "misappropriation" or "unfair competition.""
No, it usually came up as "censorship," "sedition," "libel," "witchcraft," and "heresy." The early origin of copyrights in English law falls squarely in that category:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...
"Another good example is analyst stock recommendations/price targets"
Yes, this is a good example: these are created for the purpose of turning a profit, by people who are so focused on exploiting others that they disproportionately meet the clinical definition of a psychopath. Of course they want that information to not be copied; the fewer people who know it, the more of an edge those that do know it have over their competition.
"An Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Bookes and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_1662
Copyright laws in the US and UK have been established by the national legislatures; in the US case, this is a power assigned to Congress by the Constitution. I am not aware of anything ever in the nature of a national referendum, or do you have in mind an international one?
I do agree that the copyright laws have got out of hand, though.
I also think it's a strange argument since there aren't, in most countries, any distinction in copyright between works of cultural importance and other works.
Are we supposed to care about the intention of the creators? By putting the creators' intentions first, you are promoting commercialized culture -- you are turning pieces of the culture into an exploitable asset.
When commercial entertainment is shared, we get non-commercial entertainment. Sometimes it is silly, like the OVER 9000 videos on Youtube. Sometimes it is artistic, like remixes of hit songs. If we want to have a culture that is not controlled by profiteering gluttons, we need to ignore their wishes when it comes to sharing the entertainment they create; otherwise, they will always drown out whatever culture might emerge on its own (as they do today).
Entertainment, even utter crap (Moby Dick was originally considered terrible), is still part of our culture.
"We don’t determine what civil liberties our children get based on who can make money and who can’t; we base them on what our parents fought and bled for."
Lots of people fought and bled over lots of issues, but the act of fighting and bleeding has absolutely no bearing on whether they were right or wrong. This just seems to be deliberately emotionally-loaded language, and the article would be better off without it.
http://falkvinge.net/2012/11/06/the-analog-letter-its-entire...
What do you say?
I support art.
If it turns out that your depiction of Spiderguy sucked, I'm less likely to support you in the future.
If you want to share your toys, I think that makes you awesome. But if you don't want to share your toys, I don't think you should have to.
We can debate whether the laws should change, and that's fine. But you can't claim that you "innocently overheard" my telling of a story - in your scenario, you are actively violating the law.
So go find another story teller - one who won't sue you. It's not like it's hard to find them. Don't like the quality as much? So, sponsor the community that won't sue you. Do a Kickstarter. Use Flattr. Share on FB or G+ interesting artists.