legal right yes, moral right maybe not, but who cares
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| tbuitenh Jul 05, 2010 9:47 AM EDT |
(First of all, whether or not copying can be stealing depends on your definition of theft. Those who think a theft should involve a material object or a symbol (money) representing that, should remember their currency probably isn't gold backed and therefore it wouldn't be theft if someone moved some numbers from one bank account to another (or just modified his own numbers which happens to have a similar effect). I'm not going any further into that and I'm not even going to bother coming up with a definition of theft that makes sense to me.)Quoting: ... creative artists have a right to be paid. If we enjoy a piece of recorded music, a book, drawing, photo, movie, and the condition of owning a copy of that work is paying for it, then not paying for it is stealing. Legally that's absolutely true. But the law should be created from morality and not the other way around, and I am not so sure ANY copyright law can be right. If I hear, see, read or otherwise sense data (even if I don't want to), I will immediately have a copy of it in my brain. Not a perfect copy, but if I make an imperfect copy of that imperfect copy and publish it, it will still be a good enough copy to violate a copyright. But that initial copy doesn't violate anything. Funny, eh? Paper, harddisks, CDs etc are all extensions of our brains - external memory. Without a brain to interpret the data they're just objects. And yet we distinguish between neurons and other matter. Copyright is the idea that the first person to think of a particular really large number (any piece of data really is a large number) should have some type of control (but not complete control) over who can think of that same number in the future and who can forward this number to others. This control may then be sold or rented to someone else. Why should this right exist? Seriously, why? It did not always exist and I've been told the claimed reasons for its existence have changed while it did exist. Even now there may be different reasons. The popular reason is that artists need money for food (and other things) to be able to continue providing a service we consider important. Do artists really need a "feed artists whose works you like" law, with all the negative side effects that causes, to be able to do their thing? I'm not so sure that is the case, and if it isn't then copyright is immoral. For comparison... There are plenty of other things that are important. It's important that people are nice to each other. But not being an *** who ignores everyone takes time, and therefore costs money, which means it "should" be subsidized somehow. Should there be a law that requires we pay everyone who is friendly to us? Of course I might not be the right person to argue morality, because I believe that every argument about it is a fake-logic justification of gut feelings. In this case people who used to be paid and people who no longer want to pay them are throwing nonsense arguments at each other in the mistaken belief they can convince someone who cannot be convinced because of opposite gut feelings. I'm sure both sides could find more productive uses for their time. |
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