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Comment by niggler | Hacker News Reader

Copying is all fun and games until Disney comes and "copies" your art in their products. (Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5513535 ) Then we get out the pitchforks.

I like the idea of sharing, but unless all the ducks are in a row someone is bound to get hurt, and it's not clear to me if the proposed legal statement is sound.

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We get out pitchforks when Disney violates copyrights because Disney is at the forefront of the copyright expansion effort. The fact that Disney wants us to retool our computers and the Internet to protect their business, while simultaneously playing fast and loose with other people's copyrights, is what makes people angry.

In theory, yes. But people will still be unreasonably angry if they say "go ahead and copy" and then a big corporation copies it and makes millions of dollars and you are entitled to nothing.

Honestly, I fail to see what this adds over a well chosen creative commons attribution.

I think most people are not in favor of commercial infringement - it's the non-profit file sharing that most of the argument is over.

I am not sure that is really true. I have not met many people who are angry about bootleg DVD sales; most seem to dismiss them as being of low quality, or just get annoyed when the person trying to sell them does not take "no" for an answer.

There is no argument over non-profit file sharing as it is already unenforceable. If you profit from other people's work you will be smacked down, rightly so. It is not that complicated. Anything you want (digital) can be gotten for free if your time has no value so it comes down to being lazy/cheap.

Lets replace Disney coporation with the red cross, and the "your art" with community art in a church.

How many pitchforks would red cross get in the scale of a 0-5? Would it be the same as Disney, or TPB, or that 8 year old girl in Finland? Would it even be meaningful to have all the ducks and their 8 year old girls on the same row?

I think it's very tidy to make the distinction between copying art to enjoy it as a consumer and copying work to pass it off as your own for economic gain.

That distinction has been made by the Creative Commons licenses. Copyheart seems like a lovely idea, but it's trying to solve a problem that CC solved a long time ago.

It's also trying to solve a problem CC created -- the proliferation of mutually-incompatibly licensed works whose license terms are so overly complex (and so poorly presented) that most people using them don't really understand what they do. Unfortunately, the "copyheart" thing takes it too far in the other direction, resulting in some potentially very legally problematic situations for reuse.

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