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Comment by nybble41 | Hacker News Reader

> Copyright infringement is undoubtedly a malicious act...

You're seriously trying to argue that people who commit copyright infringement do so maliciously, i.e. with the intent of harming the copyright holder? That seems... novel. And not very plausible. If true, however, it would be much more effective to ignore the work altogether, thus denying the copyright holder both direct income and free publicity.

> Any kind of security, authentication, or encryption software ever written was done so to "limit what you can do", so I don't think that is enough to constitute maliciousness.

The point of security, authentication, and encryption software is to protect the interests of the owner of the device. Defending yourself from malicious attacks by others is not an act of malice. DRM is malicious because it perverts the owner's computing resources to thwart the owner's interests and subverts their control over their own device.

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> You're seriously trying to argue that people who commit copyright infringement do so maliciously, i.e. with the intent of harming the copyright holder? That seems... novel. And not very plausible. If true, however, it would be much more effective to ignore the work altogether, thus denying the copyright holder both direct income and free publicity.

Your incredulity seems intellectually dishonest.

If not malicious, how would you describe enjoying a {book, movie, song, program, ...} that someone has offered for sale without paying for it?

Granted, it's not as clear cut as theft. You aren't depriving anyone of an item that they own.

Granted, the author may in some cases benefit indirectly from copyright infringement, e.g., when you go tell your more honest friends about it, and they go off and buy a copy for themselves.

But in a world where the vast majority of the folks who create these kinds of works need to get paid, and the way they get paid is by selling copies, consuming their work without paying for it seems really fundamentally unfair to them.

> If not malicious, how would you describe enjoying a {book, movie, song, program, ...} that someone has offered for sale without paying for it?

The natural state of the world? There is no natural right to control the distribution of things that you publish. Copyright is an artificial privilege created for the sake of social engineering.

If one thing is certain it's the fact that there is no actual malice in the act, so calling it "malicious" is intellectually dishonest. Even labeling it as freeloading would be incorrect since there is no cost ("load") imposed on anyone else. It makes zero difference to the copyright holder's material wellbeing whether you obtain an unauthorized copy or just ignore the work altogether. It's understandable that people would like to be paid for nothing more than giving permission for something that doesn't actually affect them at all, but there's no just basis for it.

Obviously people should get paid for the labor involved in creating new works, to the extent that there is a demand for them. That does not in any sense imply that they should be able to control the distribution of works which have already been created and published. There are plenty of other models (including patronage, crowdsourcing, bounties, and work for hire) which would permit creators of works to get paid fairly without control over distribution. Copyright in general and DRM in particular are among the worst choices, not only because they are unjust but also because they impose massive negative externalities on the rest of society for relatively little gain.

> subverts their control over their own device

The owner owns their device, yes but they don't always own the data on the device. DRM, for all its faults, is an attempt to reconcile to reconcile the two conflicting requirements.

The idea of "owning" data is incoherent, which readily explains the issues with DRM. It is an attempt to apply rules suited only for scarce property to non-scarce information.

Owning a resource means that you get to decide how the resource is consumed, i.e. used up. This is exclusive only to the extent that scarce resources cannot be put to two conflicting uses simultaneously, so active use by anyone else would prevent the owner from consuming the resource as they choose. Data, however, is not scarce; it can never be used up. There is no possible conflict between the "owner" and any other user, which makes the claim of ownership meaningless. No matter what anyone else might do with the data, the "owner" still has it and can use it however they wish.

The vast majority of places in the world recognize the right for a creator to exclusively reproduce their creative works for a period of time so that they may enjoy profit from their creativity.

That may be semantically different than “ownership”, but is otherwise functionally irrelevant in the context of this conversation.

Thank you for providing a perfect illustration of the is/ought fallacy. You are saying that copyright laws exist. I am saying that they should not exist because they are unjust and logically incoherent. These points are not in conflict. The fact that copyright is semantically different from ownership is the entire point. Ownership and exclusive control over physical property have a just and rational basis in scarcity. Copyright does not.

The concept of copyright absolutely does have a rational basis in scarcity. Creative works take a substantial investment of time and/or money to create.

The idea that creators shouldn't have the right to control their works is wildly radical -- even more than the FSF's view. Even the concept of copyleft relies on the right of the creator to impose licensing on their creative works. If copyrights didn't exist, licenses that require source to be shared, like GPL, couldn't exist.

You're well entitled to your opinion, but I'm glad the world doesn't work that way, because things like the restrictive clauses in GPL have been very good for the world.

> Creative works take a substantial investment of time and/or money to create.

That's the labor which is scarce. Not copies of the copyrighted work. I already said people who create things should be paid for that labor—or more to the point, have to be paid if you want them to continue to create things. That does not imply that they deserve to control what others do with the work after it's been produced and published. That was just an expedient method chosen to encourage "the sciences" (though in practice it's been applied more to entertainment). There are better ways.

> If copyrights didn't exist, licenses that require source to be shared, like GPL, couldn't exist.

The GPL was created as a counterbalance to copyright. In a world without copyright there never would have been any need for it. Moreover, permissive licenses like MIT and BSD have had their share of success even without a requirement to share source code for modifications.

> The idea that creators shouldn't have the right to control their works is wildly radical -- even more than the FSF's view.

It's not really all that radical. Copyright itself is a relatively recent invention and was originally designed as a means of censorship and protectionism for publishers. Before that there was no practical means for an author to control distribution of their work, or any expectation that they should be able to do so. The manual duplication of notable works was routine, and you wouldn't find those scribes begging the author's permission.

In more modern terms, the popularity of file sharing certainly suggests that a very large fraction of the population doesn't act like they believe authors should be able to control the distribution of their works once they're published. Copyright is mainly popular among those who directly benefit from it, much like any other subsidy.

> I already said people who create things should be paid for that labor—or more to the point, have to be paid if you want them to continue to create things.

> There are better ways.

Like what, paying for labor instead of the work itself? That may work well (and already does) for more commoditized/custom-purpose/one-time-use creative works, but how do we apply something like that to something like recorded-media entertainment? Prepay for Taylor Swift's next album on Kickstarter?

> Like what, paying for labor instead of the work itself?

Yes, exactly. There is no reason why a Kickstarter or Patreon model wouldn't work for recorded-media entertainment. Those approaches have already been used for things which are much more labor-intensive than music albums.

Artists with an established brand and fan following have some additional options, such as limited-edition merchandise or signed prints. Scarce physical goods that can't just be duplicated because their value is derived from their providence.

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