opaqueice;195629 Wrote: > I hate it when people equate copyright violations with theft. They are > simply not at all alike. If I copy a digital music file from its > owner, I haven't taken anything away from them, or deprived them of > anything. It's completely unlike stealing something (which doesn't > necessarily make it right, just different). > > Sometimes people argue that in copying, you are depriving the rights > owner of possible future income, since you are now less likely to > purchase the music (which itself is an assumption), and have therefore > "stolen" something from them. But you might as well argue that in > choosing to buy one bottle of wine over another, you're depriving the > other vineyard of potential profits, and are therefore guilty of theft. > If you stay home and don't buy anything, are you stealing from every > company you might have bought something from? Obviously not - the > concept of property and ownership just isn't the correct one for these > cases, and it's a shame it's gotten conflated with it. > > This isn't an issue of moral right, it's an issue of what is best for > our society. In the case of physical property we have decided > collectively it's best to allow owenership and make theft a crime and > an immoral act. But the question of copyright is relatively very > recent, and nothing is forcing us to choose any particular path. > It's no more clear that copying music is wrong than it is that > preventing music from being copied is wrong. It's just not a moral > issue, at least not to me - it's a question of what is best.
Well, there is certainly a fundamental difference in that copying intellectual property does not deprive the owner of the intellectual property, while taking an apple deprives the owner of that apple. On the other hand, if we stipulate that the IP owner has rights associated with the IP, then copying the IP deprives the owner of those rights, just as taking an apple deprives the owner of the right to do what he pleases with the apple. Whether there should be any recognized rights to intellectual property is a valid question. Certainly, the economic incentive to invest the time and money to produce works, be they art, music, literature, product designs, or whatever, is severely curtailed if someone can just swoop in, take those works, and have the revenue opportunity with none of the initial investment risk. Further, that dynamic leads to keeping information secret, and therefore slows progress on the "state of the art" that would occur if information were more readily shared. The basic intent of patent and copyright law is to provide the protections that lead to such information sharing. On the other hand, aspects such as absurdly long terms of copyright, draconian interpretations of fair use, etc., all subject to the whims of Congress, do not make a whole lot of sense either. Personally, I favor consentual contracts between IP owners and licensees, with contract violations subject to remedy through civil law, but I do not expect to see that in my life time. As far as it being "a question of what is best," that is a pretty heavy philosophical discussion in itself, lol. -- jeffmeh ------------------------------------------------------------------------ jeffmeh's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3986 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=34366 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
