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Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

>Avoiding money laundering is a laudable goal, while avoid the dissemination of information is not clearly so.

You're not comparing apples to apples. The goal of money laundering laws is to make it harder to profit from crimes, achieved by the means of e.g. violating financial privacy.

The goal of copyright laws is not to "prevent dissemination of information" but to encourage better intellectual works by granting their creators temporary control of them; this is achieved by the means of restricting some kinds of copying.

Both intents are noble; to characterize the goal of copyright law as "preventing the dissemination of information" is the wrong comparison.

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You've introduced a means into your goal:

goal: "encourage better intellectual works"

means: "granting their creators temporary control of them"

There are other ways to meet that goal.

Can't the same be said about money laundering laws

Yeah, it was just a nitpick to clarify means and ends. I think the means and the ends need to be acceptable in any endeavor, one never justifies the other. But at the same time, one never disqualifies the other.

Your point wasn't a nitpick. It is crucial to get the structures right, because otherwise the status quo easily hides behind non-obvious circular reasoning.

>There are other ways to meet that goal.

And yet, judging from international laws, all lawmakers worldwide seem agree that a variation of the current method is the preferred one.

There are plenty of laws that give federal grants to artists and scholarships to graduate students.

Those are supplementary laws -- since all country also have similar copyright laws too.

And 99% of those you mention are for avant garde, classical, jazz, traditional and other endangered species of art.

Most lawmakers worldwide have shitty ideas on most topics.

And most individual people, especially those involved in an industry only as consumers, have naive and ridiculous ideas of what would work.

It's almost like, oh I don't know, a balance of consumer and business interests and input would lead to more acceptable outcomes for everyone, when drawing up policy, as opposed to shutting one side out of the discussion completely.

Weird, eh?

Original copyright law expired after so many years to fall into the public domain so others could use it and it made copyright holders invent new copyrights to encourage better intellectual works.

Only Mickey Mouse was set to expire so Disney had the laws changed. The same with Time Warner aka DC Comics and Superman. So other companies can't use them as they will never fall into the public domain.

That's a bit parochial --- I guess you are talking about the origin of copyright law in the US? The world is older than that country. Copyright law has its origins in censorship and rent seeking.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law and the linked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne and even further back.

Yes US copyright law is trying to be pushed on other nations.

http://www.intellectualpropertylawfirms.com/resources/intell...

US copyright used to be only 14 years then it went into public domain. But it has been changed over the decades.

The biggest change happend in the 80s, when USA signed the Bern convention on copyright.

Note btw that said convention was called to merge two systems of copyright. The English, and the "continental" (French).

The English system was basically what the US system copied back in the day. It was mainly focused on the economic aspect and thus had a "short" duration.

The French concept on the other hand, "rights of the author", was more focused on the reputation of the author, and thus had a long time frame (life of author+x years). It was about giving the author the ability to say "no you can't use my creation in your political campaign".

Frankly, if i am to speculate, i would claim that USA stayed out of these conventions as long as it was importer rather than exporter.

> It was about giving the author the ability to say "no you can't use my creation in your political campaign".

Which is why the modern US system is extreme nonsense. Political speech is protected under the First Amendment and that kind of use is basically the purpose of fair use, but we still have century+ copyright terms.

Free Speech only protects you from the government, not other people and corporations and colleges, etc. Internet companies can ban you or shut down your account or censor you if they don't like your speech.

Try posting opinions that go against what the majority believe and see what happens.

It is more than just copyright. I remember some politicians tried to use songs for their campaigns to have the artists complain because they didn't support the politician.

> Free Speech only protects you from the government, not other people and corporations and colleges, etc. Internet companies can ban you or shut down your account or censor you if they don't like your speech.

"Internet companies" can't ban you from the internet, only from their own sites. You can make your own site and they have nothing to say about what you put on it. They can't control what you say, only where you say it. Which isn't nothing, but it's definitely a different thing than copyright, where they can control what you can say regardless of where you say it.

> I remember some politicians tried to use songs for their campaigns to have the artists complain because they didn't support the politician.

But that kind of sorts itself out by itself then, doesn't it? If you use an artist's work you're giving them the stage. If they hate you, they're going to step out onto that stage and denounce you with everybody watching. If stupid politicians want to self-immolate like that then let them and there will be fewer stupid politicians.

Hum, no, modern copyright laws do not have have the intent of encouraging better intellectual works. Politicians may claim this intent on some countries to deceive the population, but it is obvious by their format that they were not created for that goal.

Anti money laundering laws vary a lot in quality, and some of them do have the goal of catching criminals.

It might not be the goal that they serve in practice, but if you ask a random person why they think some sort of copyright is a good idea, provided that they do think that, uh,

actually nevermind a fair number of them will probably talk about the rights of the creator of the work instead. Hm.

Different people have different goals for the laws. For a sane comparison, you should look at the most laudable goals, otherwise it's going to be a fruitless discussion, trying to divine the "real" reason behind copyright laws.

For a sane comparison, you should look at the most laudable goals

I don't think this is self evident. One cannot understand the current state of copyright without also understanding the less than laudable goals of some of the media conglomerates.

> Different people have different goals for the laws. For a sane comparison, you should look at the most laudable goals

I couldn't disagree more. This makes you a simpleton who's excessively vulnerable to baptists-and-bootleggers type efforts. Don't ever support legislation (or anything else!) because it's labeled with a goal; attaching a goal to something is free.

This comic is actually highly relevant: http://dilbert.com/strip/2003-10-05

For a sane view of laws, you should look at the effects. What people say they want the law to do just isn't relevant compared to what it actually does.

The clause in the US Constitution that gives Congress the power to create copyright laws says

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

The original intent is actually written into the Constitution.

That's the purported intent of the framers of the American constitution. Of course, that's not the origin of copyright laws.

Did you know, that there were other countries before the US?

> The goal of copyright laws is not to "prevent dissemination of information" but to encourage better intellectual works by granting their creators temporary control of them

We know that copyright systems originate in efforts by the state to prevent publications from being disseminated freely. This is all part of the same political impulse that made private organizations such as volunteer firemen illegal -- if you let people assemble and speak to each other, who knows what might happen.

So you've stumbled into the interesting question "if we create a system to promote goal X, but later decide we can't endorse X and relabel the system as promoting goal Y (without making non-cosmetic changes to the system), what is that system's goal?"

It's like the Ship of Theseus for organizations. It's not really crazy to argue that the goal is still X.

(As to this particular case, I don't believe that the US government is particularly interested in using copyright to prevent stuff from getting published. But I do think the people saying "the goal of copyright is to prevent certain things from being published" have a reasonable argument that deserves more than just an offhand dismissal.)

> As to this particular case, I don't believe that the US government is particularly interested in using copyright to prevent stuff from getting published.

There is a fair argument to be made that the companies who induce the government to enact excessive copyright terms do want exactly that, because competition with more public domain works would reduce the margins on works still under copyright (supply and demand).

It also allows those companies to more effectively censor unflattering parts of their own history, e.g. Disney's Song of the South.

Money laundering laws require your driver's license number when transfering accounts to verify who you are. They discriminate against those who can't get a license for some reason.

Copyright laws get rid of fair use by DMCA takedown notices of any material that has even a small bit of copyrighted material even if it was nonprofit or educational or parody and covered under fair use.

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