Jail Terms for Unlocking Cellphones Shows the Heart of the Copyright Monopoly | Hacker News Reader

Jail Terms for Unlocking Cellphones Shows the Heart of the Copyright Monopoly

torrentfreak.com

16 pointsninthfrank0710 comments

The copyright monopoly was always about control over other people’s property, and always about preventing creativity and innovation that could threaten the incumbents

I don't know about always, I suspect that at first, for a year or two, it was about getting incentives to the right people. But as soon as a printer made better money than a writer, that was the end of incentives to the creators.

But Falkvinge is correct: right now, copyright is about protecting incumbents. It's my belief that governments tend to back "intellectual property" as a way to stuff the free speech genie back into the bottle. Property rights are much stronger than free speech rights almost everywhere. Invoking "my property" on somebody's creation is just a way of keeping most people from speaking out.

Some very "down is up and up is down" speak here, to generalize from DMCA applied to cell phones (which is a travesty, everyone agrees) to saying copyright is about "control over other peoples' property." Falkvinge strains to find the edge cases in the application of the copyright laws, then tries to make it seem like that's what the copyright battle is really over. But in reality, the battle is not about copyright suppressing "creativity and innovation." The MPAA and RIAA aren't coming after people making their own movies, music, software, and games and releasing them under Creative Commons-type licenses. What the battle is about is people wanting to download shit for free. It's the rhetorical equivalent of criminals holding up hostages as human shields.

It's not about "people downloading shit for free" and it has never been about that. Nobody downloads things "for free," there are real costs associated with downloading anything on the internet. If these companies wanted a cut of that it would make significantly more sense for them to lobby for more subsidization funded by a tax on general internet or computer use; computers are pervasive enough that this would be pretty profitable for them. This is not the route they chose though, they instead chose to attack people's free speech by redefining the word "property" for their own purposes.

Obviously they chose to do it this way because it grants them significantly more power when an entire branch of law is devoted to the restrictions they can impose by being "copyright holders," rather than them just receiving simple monetary kickbacks. And this is their goal: to gain power over you and I.

> This is not the route they chose though, they instead chose to attack people's free speech by redefining the word "property" for their own purposes

Nope. The term "intellectual property" has been used with its current meaning for well over 150 years, long before the companies you refer to existed. They are not redefining "property".

It doesn't really matter how old the use (or in this case, misuse) of the term is. It is still an affront to the way we consider property in all other aspects. Just because they were doing it a long time ago does not make it any less invalid now.

It is quite consistent with the way we consider property in all other aspects. In law, property is any thing, tangible or intangible whereby a legal relationship between persons and the State enforces a possessory interest or legal title in that thing. It has never been limited to just physical things the way modern revisionists are trying to claim.

> This is not the route they chose though, they instead chose to attack people's free speech by redefining the word "property" for their own purposes.

Property rights over intangible things is part of the definition of "property" for hundreds of years. They're part of the definition of "property"--no "redefining" needed.

Where "control over other peoples' property" comes in is making it illegal to alter the workings of a device you paid for and own.

Sure. The problem is then generalizing from that scenario to making it seem like the whole copyright battle is about control over "other peoples' property."

Sure. Only the DRM part, because that's a spy in your house, and you are paying the room and board.

They want that in all devices, because nobody would volunteer to have it in any general-purpose device.

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