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Comment by jpwagner | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand your point(s) at all.

  "...copyright law simply maintains the proper incentives for the system to work."

What? The whole question is whether the system works, you can't just assert that it does.

I cannot get any more out of your post than "I think copyright is good, and China is bad."

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Disney made money from proprietary content last quarter (they paid $0.35/share dividend), and censorship helped the Chinese Communist government remain in power. So the system "works" in the sense that it performs as designed. I don't think I asserted anything that isn't obvious, and that wasn't Bucheit's point.

The question Bucheit raises is whether copyright protection is bad because censorship is bad? Which isn't fair because the ends are always more important than the means when human rights are at stake.

For example, if Bucheit wanted to show copyright protection in a different light, perhaps he could have shown its virtue by comparing it to keeping secrets about underground railroad stations?

But showing counter-examples is merely proving Godwin's law. Which I think is what Bucheit's analogy showed to begin with.

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