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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

I recently came to the conclusion that it was never about copyright. It's about corporate control, about punishing contempt for business model.

Aaron Swartz was punished because he disrespected a business model. All the kids sued by the MAFIAA were punished because they disrespected a business model. Copyright was merely the mechanism to make it stick. But AI companies and Meta can disrespect copyright all they want, because in their case, it serves a corporate business model, and those hurt or disenfranchised by it are regular people or much smaller companies.

The law doesn't exist to protect the weak from the powerful, but to enable the powerful to punish the weak.

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This is pretty close. They attacked the business model, which was an attack on the law itself, which was an attack on the civil structure, which was an attack on everyone who benefits from it.

Lots of people have a vested interest in civil structure, from the poor to the rich. Everyone would be worse off if the US looked like Haiti.

That said, people benefit in different amounts from the system at Large, and lose or benefit from Individual policies

What do you think copyright is in service of? It doesn’t exist for its own sake.

It provides a legal justification for censorship. Originally used by The Church to prevent the wrong sort of bible from being printed. It has always been about insulating monopolists and gatekeepers against change.

We desperately need to find better ways to pay creators, and it's good that they've managed to put copyright law to some non-nefarious use towards that end. But they deserve something that actually meets their needs, which copyright law does not.

The justification is that it's supposed to protect the individual creative from more powerful publishers just taking and copying their stuff. In practice, it seems to mostly protect the interests of the most powerful party.

No, it has nothing to do with relative power. It is about economic incentives to encourage creation -- the "business models" you deride in your earlier comment.

> The primary purpose behind copyright law is to foster the creation and dissemination of works for the benefit of the public. By granting authors the exclusive right to authorize certain uses of their works, copyright provides economic incentives to create new works and to make them available in the marketplace.

https://www.uspto.gov/ip-policy/copyright-policy/copyright-b...

You confuse words with outcomes. The fact that they say that that's the intent, doesn't mean that it's always the outcome. Copyright offers the most protection if you've got the funds to litigate. The government isn't going to do it for you. And copyright has absolutely been used to stifle the creation and dissemination of works for the benefit of the public.

> Aaron Swartz was punished because he disrespected a business model.

Exactly. And what's more, it's a business model, keeping behind paywalls scientific papers that we the public have already paid for once with our tax dollars, that shouldn't even exist in the first place.

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