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Comment by andreyf | Hacker News Reader

He's either being naive or intellectually dishonest; and I don't think he's naive.

This meme needs to die [1]. A fisherman doesn't care that a dolphin isn't a fish - when he calls it that, he means that it swims in the sea, gets caught in his net, and tastes delicious. Similarly, Murdoch's perspective is that of the copyright investor - he sees the purpose of copyright law as creating and protecting a new class of property in order to encourage its production. His assets are invested in the production of this "new-style-property" which the federal government promised to protect (just as it does material property). From his point of view, the nature of distribution of that property just aren't relevant.

1. The cognitive bias is so painfully blatant: "the guy I disagree with is a liar bullshitting idiots, or is an idiot himself"? Come on.

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> This meme needs to die ... The cognitive bias is so painfully blatant: "the guy I disagree with is a liar bullshitting idiots, or is an idiot himself"? Come on.

Cognitive bias? Why restate the assertion with loaded terms?

Are you saying that it is not intellectually dishonest to equate copyright infringement with theft? Theft deprives its victim of property.

Cognitive bias? Why restate the assertion with loaded terms?

The bias is the desire to demonize someone perceived as an adversary as a liar and an idiot, even if it isn't an accurate model of their behavior. Demonizing someone is nice if you want to start a lynching mob, but not if you want to understand their point of view.

Are you saying that it is not intellectually dishonest to equate copyright infringement with theft?

Precisely. Just as it isn't "intellectually dishonest" to equate a dolphin with a fish, from the point of view of an guy in a boat with a spear.

Theft deprives its victim of property.

Technical detail. Murdoch is investing billions of dollars into what he sees as a "factory manufacturing IP". To him, the output of that factory is his property. Think of it as a magic chicken machine - if you have a machine that makes chickens out of nothing, does that justify stealing chickens from you? After all, you can make more copies of at no cost.

He's saying the laws we agreed on treat physical property and intellectual property the same, and so to Murdoch there's no need to regard the differences.

> He's saying the laws we agreed on treat physical property and intellectual property the same

Well this seems incorrect on its face. e.g. Copyright law

To my knowledge, copyright does not even address physical property. Thus it does not treat physical property the same as intellectual property.

I don't think Murdoch is an idiot, far from it. Is he a liar, well I'm with Dr House (a fictional medical consultant) on that one - we all lie in some measure. Here Murdoch is spinning the standard lie equating theft (illegal) with copy infringement (tortuous) in order to enhance peoples guilt.

They are markedly different. Equating them is, as I rather cicuitiously said, intellectually dishonest. Theft denies a person the possession of the property, copyright infringement does not.

Copyright as it has been formulated, to encourage movement of works into the public domain in return for a limited monopoly, is a fantastic legal device. But the likes of Murdoch have perverted this deal - I don't deny content creators a right to profit from their work. However, the major corporations and the governments that have acceded to their demands have denied the free enjoyment of much work which should by now have entered the public domain.

The terms of copyright should have reduced in-line with lower cost reproduction methods but instead it has increased. If there is any theft involved in all this it is theft from the public domain.

Intellectual property is not really a "new class" of property it has been around for centuries and began precipitating into law with Queen Anne's Statute in the early 1700s. It is simply a reflection that a man should earn from the fruit of his labours whether they be physical or ethereal fruit.

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