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Comment by markvdb | Hacker News Reader

This comparison is intellectually lazy or maybe even dishonest.

One difference between a house and a recording is marginal cost of replication/reproduction: not zero in case of a house, effectively zero in case of a recording.

Without a government granted monopoly on copies, the marginal financial value of a copy is close to zero in all but the most exotic cases.

With a government granted monopoly comes a real cost: enforcement, and loss of social value. How does one justify that?

Authors' descendants do not have a $DEITY granted eternal right to exploit the author's work, and rightly so. This is why "intellectual property" can be more accurately described as "intellectual rights".

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On the other hand, the society does not have a $DEITY granted right to benefit from the creations of an author, material or immaterial.

The fact that in one case the creation is easily reproducible with almost zero marginal costs, speaks not of the inherent value of the original creation (that was presumably undisputed at the author's lifetime), but is mere opportunistic thinking from the perspective of the society.

How would you vote against that if you were on your deathbed? You can burn your house, but you cannot undo music or literature.

I come from a former Russian occupied country that has maybe left me a bit overprotective of private property. The notion of requisitioning property "for the good of The People" is deeply repulsive - a lot of families here, including mine, actually were liberated from their house, farm, land and personal freedoms by the "liberators". So maybe after some decades, I should leave more room for "The People".

The main point against that stance is that no creation happens in a vacuum. Every cultural product is a collective creation to a certain extent. Reduction of copyright terms is simply giving back to the society's pool of creations that is the public domain.

This doesnt create many opportunities for abuse like a monopoly of the state on the creations. Public domain is, by virtue of being freely reproducible, free.

Freely sharing copies after a reasonably short state protected monopoly has expired does not equal stealing.

P.S. I do feel for the difficult bit of history in your native country's past. Lots of friends and family from a small republic "liberated" 3 times the last 80 years, consecutively by the USSR, Nazi Germany, and again the USSR...

What we are saying is, that you get to keep the original creation.

There is nothing stopping the children of the musician from continuing to listen to that music.

But nothing also stops other people from listening to it either if they lose exclusive rights to it.

Nobody is liberated from anything, as they still can listen to that music as much as they want.

Copying something is not theft. The original remains intact.

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