Comment by jules | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jules | Hacker News Reader

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So what is the difference between stealing and copyright infringement? That the scarcity in the latter case comes from artificial rules? If you have a piece of land with oil in the ground then what makes that oil scarce is the government artificially protecting your property rights, just like copyrighted content is scarce because of the government's protection of copy rights. Your ability to sell the oil depends on the artificial rules set by the government (or on your private army), just like your ability to sell a book depends on artificial rules set by the government (or on a private army).

The argument that if somebody takes the oil out of your ground you don't have the oil anymore is not important in a discussion of whether it's ethical to do so, because the effects are the same for copyright infringement. If you write a book and I put a copy of it online, then the net effect is that you can't sell your book effectively anymore. Just like the case where I take the oil that's easy to get out of the ground and you can't sell your oil effectively anymore.

So saying that copyright infringement is not stealing, while perhaps law technically true, is a dishonest presentation of the issue. The feelings of guilt are not unwarranted.

> If you have a piece of land with oil in the ground then what makes that oil scarce is the government artificially protecting your property rights

No. What makes it scarce is that it is some limited number of kilograms of oil. If two people want it, each can only have half. There is no limited number of copies for data. If two, or two million, people want a copy, they can all make one -- or they could if the law allowed them: which is the point: the scarcity is not imposed by physics but by legal choice.

I agree scarce is not the right word. What I meant is that your ability to sell the oil depends on artificial rules by the government. The ability to sell the product is what's important here, not "having" the product. Having the product just allows you to use it yourself, which in the case of oil and in the case of copyrighted material is mostly useless.

(but it's not true that scarcity of oil is only imposed by physics, it's also decided artificially by OPEC)

To make things clearer, change it from oil to a lake that you own. Access to the privately owned lake is scarce for artificial reasons. Property means control over something, and if you cannot maintain control then in many cases there is no benefit in possession/creation. In this respect property is always the same, whether physical or intellectual: owning the land or copyright only works if you control access/distribution.

Of course with a limited thing like oil there's also the fact that not only would you be unable to capitalise, you would be unable to even be the end-user of the resource, when people steal it. But that's just an extra dimension to consider, not relevant to the core ethical issue, as the grandparent poster was trying to say.

> Access to the privately owned lake is scarce for artificial reasons.

Again, No. Ultimately, access is limited by physical limits: not everyone can easily travel to the lake and not everyone can fit in or around it. These things do not apply to data: everyone can make a copy.

> and if you cannot maintain control then in many cases there is no benefit in possession/creation

And data/information (abstract goods) are exactly a case where this does not apply. Abstract goods are nonrivalrous: your use and benefit from them does not limit mine.

Of course, there are probably various ways to construe 'property' to accommodate abstract goods, and whatever else, and they may even be useful and practical. But with abstract goods there is something different in physical fact. Surely that is the most important thing to have in mind if you want to consider ways of handling it.

As to the ethics, the physical basis is critical, because it is where the buck stops. Since copying renders no direct physical harm to the copyright 'owner' it must make us think differently about it.

The physical limit is still irrelevant to the debate: the number of people who want to use the lake could easily be far less than the number of people who potentially could use the lake. In this situation, the lake is artificially scarce according to the owner's property rights, not because of any physical limitations.

The physical basis is just an incidental detail. The ethical basis is that individuals must use their minds to survive, meaning they must have ownership over the produce of their minds to survive, meaning they must have property rights. To say that somebody who creates a work, whether intellectual or otherwise, should not have control over its access/distribution, is to argue against property rights and indeed the right to survive.

As the previous poster argued, pirating/stealing my intellectual property amounts to removing my ability to profit from my creation/property, which amounts to direct (physical) harm to me, the copyright owner. True, it doesn't stop me using my creation, but that's hardly the point. What if I invent a perpetual motion machine, should just anyone be able to then tap into my non-scarce energy source without permission? Besides, saying property should be granted on the basis of physical scarcity says nothing about why it should be granted to a particular person - it's a poor criterion all round.

That analogy doesn't apply because it's not the same thing. If I take some of your oil you lose some of your oil. Now if I went out and cloned it that's not stealing under the stated definition. This is the same nonsense the GPL tries to shove down peoples throats and I don't know why so many people are buying it. It's not about wrong right in this case so there's no need to bring pre-concevied biases into it.

What are you suggesting? To eliminate copyright law, and thereby eliminate books, music, software, etc?

The works of Shakespeare (died 1616) were written without copyright protection (Statue of Anne 1709). It can be argued, based on the amount of copying from previous authors, that they could only be written because there was their sources were not subject to copyright.

Although copyright is one mechanism to create incentives for creative activity, it is far from the only mechanism.

kb

What are you suggesting? That before, or outside, copyright law there was no creative production?

Copyright might assist production (though the evidence is shaky), but to say it is a sine qua non is flat out wrong.

There certainly was less creative production, but history was different. Until recently copying and distributing something wasn't free and effortless. So it used to be that you could still make a decent living out of something even if somebody else copied you. This is no longer the case.

As a result many software companies are turning to server based applications, where they can physically enforce artificial scarcity. Now consumers are not only disallowed from copying and distributing the software, but (1) they are no longer even able to (2) they often lose control of their own data (3) they lose control over their usage of the software: the company can suspend their account at any time. Is this a good thing? In my opinion it is not.

It used to be hard to copy. This greatly limited the effect of copying. For example in the 18th and 19th centuries, books made almost all of their money on the first print run. By the time a copier could get a copy out, there wasn't much money left to be made from the book, and so it was hard for the copier to recoup his copying costs.

Justice Breyer, back when he was a law professor, not a Supreme Court justice, wrote an interesting article about this, arguing that copyright throughout most of its history was in fact unnecessary because of the delay and costs of copying.

From the latter half of the 20th century onward, copying technology has gotten cheaper and faster. That has shifted the balance. The copier can now, especially with digital goods, get their copy out to the market fast enough to reduce or eliminate the sales of the original.

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