Gak! I couldn't resist ... On Fri, 7 Nov 2003, District Webmaster wrote:
> His question was: what difference is there between a creator's right > to his own work, and other property rights? [Man, I hate debating copyrights. My apologies to you all--and on no-flame day, too! *sigh*] The difference is ease of duplication, and directly related to that is the difference on what it's protecting. If you sell a dollhouse to me, I can duplicate that dollhouse a thousand times and sell each dollhouse for half the price you charged me for it. In fact, you don't even have to sell the dollhouse to me--I can come over to your house, look at the dollhouse, and then start selling dollhouses undercutting your price. This is perfectly legal--even if you make all your money selling dollhouses and I end up putting you out of business. Tough luck! Property laws don't protect duplication. If you own something physical, anybody can duplicate it--so long as they use their own resources and tools. Copyright laws protect duplication. If you own the copyright to a poem, I can look at that poem, memorize it quickly in my head, go home, and with my own pen and my own piece of paper write down the poem a thousand times and try and sell that poem to other people. If I do that, I'm infringing copyright and can be sued. This huge difference between what property laws protect and what copyright laws protect is why many people dislike using the term "stealing" to apply to copyright infringement--it confuses the issue by making copyright law seem more similar to property law than it really is. Imagine I have a "matter duplicator" straight off of Star Trek. And let's say you have a store where you sell wooden chairs. I buy one of your chairs, use my "matter duplicator" to make a million chairs, and start selling them at a mere fraction of the price. Almost immediately, you go out of business. Question: have I 'stolen' from you? Or is there something else at work? Point to ponder: yes, perhaps I've put you out of business, but now the world has a basically infinite amount of chairs for, basically, free. Is what I've done inherently bad, or inherently good? Is artificially limiting the number of chairs available, say perhaps by law, beneficial to the population as a whole? Final point: if we had a "matter duplicator", that would be great, right? Solve the world's hunger problems, everyone can live in huge mansions (I can just duplicate yours for free), we'll all have the fastest computers (you can sell copies of yours for cheap), etc. Paradise, right? Why wouldn't the same thing work with copyright? We've got "information duplicators"--we can solve the world's information problems by duplicating everything for such a low cost as to almost be minimal, right? The problem is: why would anybody create anything new? Once I created something, it would instantly be duplicated and I wouldn't be able to make enough money to feed my wife and kids. So I stop creating new stuff and go be a farmer instead. So everybody decides on a compromise: we'll allow you an "artificial monopoly" for sixteen years, where we make it illegal for anybody else to copy your stuff until you've made enough money to make it worthwhile to actually /create/. We realize this isn't the "natural" way of doing things--making it illegal for other people to copy something that's naturally easy to copy. But we figure it's the only way that will work. This is why copyright is often called a compromise between the artist and the public domain. We, the public domain, are giving you (the artist) a limited time to make it worth your while to actually create. We're voluntarily [via the government and the court system] restraining ourselves from copying your works, allowing you to charge whatever hugely steep price you want, for a certain period of time so that you can make enough money to feed your family. After that, we [the public domain] get all of our rights back [to freely copy your work]. Unfortunately, the last 80 years of copyright law have seriously messed up this vision. Most people don't see it that way any more. More and more, copyright is being compared to physical property despite the immense differences in what they are and the laws they cover. More and more, people are saying, "But what's the difference between physical property and intellectual property? My house doesn't 'expire' sixteen years after I build it, so why should my copyright?" Can you spot the logical fallacy there now? Can you go back to your friend and explain to him /exactly/ "what the difference is between a creator's right to his own work, and 'other' property rights"? Man, I apologies again for this long rant. Blast. I should have known better than to go trolling on the copyright topic. It's only myself I ended up catching in the end. *sigh* ~ ross "written blasted /papers/ on copyright for heaven's sake" werner -- This sentence would be seven words long if it were six words shorter. ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
