Comment by betterunix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by betterunix | Hacker News Reader

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Except that the notion of property ownership predates written records and organized government. Copyright was started in the 17th century to address the failure of previous censorship efforts in a world of new technology (the printing press), and eventually became a means by which printers could secure a competitive advantage.

We now live in a world where the machines needed to copy things are commonly owned by individuals. Copyright, having been designed to regulate industry, is massively out of date -- individuals do not have the resources needed to decide if they are abiding by copyright. Even the entertainment companies that cry about the importance of copyrights know this, which is why they keep pushing for DRM. No sane person actually believes that normal people are going to stop and think about whether or not they are obeying copyright laws; that is just not how people generally behave.

The truth is, in the 21st century copyright is nothing more than a red flag law that exists solely to protect obsolete industries.

> Except that the notion of property ownership predates written records and organized government.

What people have in the absence of government is not property, but merely possession. No more or less binding on anyone else than a dog with a bone.

At least you are consistent: You make our rights a creation of government. This has the interesting side-effect of elevating intellectual property to the same level as real property.

You have to wonder if the framers talked about our actual natural rights in such disrespectful terms: "The saying there shall be no monopolies lessens the incitement to ingenuity, which is spurred on by the hope of a monopoly for a limited time, as of 14 years; but the benefit even of limited monopolies is too doubtful to be opposed to that of their general suppression."

You know what industry is truly obsolete? The film industry. I mean the actual film-itself industry. Why? Because producers, studios, and exhibitors have nearly completed the move to all-digital pipelines. The product formerly made by Kodak and Fuji and processed by companies like Technicolor and Deluxe no longer has a market (or at least not one of any appreciably size). Thanks to digital media, the industry that produced and developed celluloid media has been rendered obsolete.

Does this strike you as being even remotely analogous to the situation faced by the people who make television, movies, books, and music?

> Except that the notion of property ownership predates written records and organized government. Copyright was started in the 17th century...

So what? The previous poster's point is that both forms of property are social contracts. All private property, physical or otherwise, are nothing but societal agreements, regardless of whether there is a written record or what point in history the agreement began.

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