Comment by decode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by decode | Hacker News Reader

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> Sorry guys, regardless of what utopian ideals of OSS you have, and I have them too, you must respect the creator's wishes. If they ask you to pay for the software, then you MUST pay for the software. Anything else is theft.

In a legal sense, this is patently false in every country I know of. Even ignoring the point others have made that theft is not copyright infringement under the law, the assertion is false. Every country I know of has exceptions to copyright law. In the US it's called Fair Use, in many Commonwealth nations it's called Fair Dealing, in Germany it's just called "Limitations on Copyright" (Schranken des Urheberrechts). In every case, the creator's wishes are not absolute.

But more interesting to me is that we have taken a purely legal concept that was completely new just 303 years ago and turned it into a broadly accepted moral imperative. Those with a vested interest have succeeded in tying this new legal concept to an ancient moral wrong, that of theft. And they have been so successful at this, that many people would dismiss the distinction as semantic quibbling. To me, this is a fascinating sociological and philosophical phenomenon.

For anyone else who is interested in this cultural history, I highly recommend "Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars" by William Patry.

The moral underpinnings of copyright are quite a bit older than that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law#Early_....

Re: copyright being 303 years old. First, there were developments in copyright prior to the English copyright act. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law#Early_.... Printing in England was done by a royally chartered monopoly from 1557. Printing was regulated by an order of the Star Chamber in 1637 and the Licensing Press Act of 1679 before the Statute of Anne introduced copyrights in 1710. So basically contemporaneously with the widespread adoption of technology in England that enabled copies of written works to be quickly made, regulation has existed to protect works from copying. Copyright itself has existed for 300 of the 500 or so years since printed books became common in England.

I agree that it's not sensible to link copyright to the ancient moral crime of theft. It's more sensible to link it to the very old if not ancient moral crime of trespass: http://www.slesher.com/trespass.html.

A copyright owner's moral right is basically the right to exclude--the right to control with whom one shares his original work.

Good thing I'm not a complete idiot, or I wouldn't know or understand fair use. People tend to forget that fair use is limited in its scope. Unfortunately, a lot of people's idea of fair use is, "I want it, so I'm gonna take it." It IS a moral imperative. It IS stealing. I don't care how you sugarcoat it. In high-school and the first part of my college life, I pirated music and applications with impunity. I justified it every way I could, but at the end of the day, I realized I was stealing -- regardless of what nuanced legal argument I could come up with. It drives me crazy when people say "it's not stealing, it's just copyright infringement," like that magically makes what they are doing better.

> It IS stealing. I don't care how you sugarcoat it.

Surely you understand that it’s possible for people who aren’t you to look at the same facts, and come to a different conclusion? Not because they’re fooling themselves, but simply because people of good heart are allowed to have differences of opinion.

Try this video, particularly the bit that starts at 10:00 http://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html

> It IS stealing. I don't care how you sugarcoat it.

If you're going to alter the definition of "stealing" to cover things that aren't stealing, then why stop there? Why not call copyright infringement "arson" or "murder" too?

Making an unlicensed replica of another person's non-rival good is not the same thing as depriving another person of a rival good in their possession. You can even hold both to be worthy of legal censure without having to advance this disingenuous prevarication.

If you're in favor of strict IP law, do you not see how playing these semantic games actually undermines your credibility and therefore your argument?

The thing is, law is nothing more than codified morality. I do believe, in a court of law, that we should make a distinction between theft and copyright. Several Supreme Court justices agree that this is the case. However, when looking and the very core of the issue, absent legal codification, I'm still taking something that isn't mine, regardless of whether or not it was merely a copy. That is where I am coming from. Responsible adults shouldn't need to split legal hairs, we should recognize that we are, at its core, taking what is not ours to take. There is a legal distinction, but not a moral one.

The law is significantly divergent from morality, codified or otherwise, and is often itself immoral.

But, that said, when looking at the issue from a purely moral perspective, the difference becomes even more clearly illuminated: again, making a replica of someone else's thing is utterly different from taking their thing away from them. This isn't a hair split in the slightest: the key component of harm that makes theft immoral just isn't present with copying.

But you're not compensating them for the time they spent making it. They've spent time to make this thing, and you're taking a copy of this thing without spending a dime for their effort. It's a service. A labor. That you're not paying for.

So? You're not entitled for compensation for the time you spend making anything. Your effort is neither a service nor labor done one anyone else's behalf; it's a speculative capital investment, and your risk to bear. If I spend millions of dollars developing a new type of camera film in 2000, and digital cameras make film cameras obsolete before I earn a penny of revenue, that's too bad, but no one owes me anything. Spent a billion bucks building new houses in 2008? Sorry to hear it, but you don't get to tear down other people's houses to restore the value of yours.

And if you say that copying is different from anything else that might diminish your return because you think you already had some inherent right to control whether other people make their own replicas of your stuff, then you're begging the question; your lack of ROI can't itself be the justification for copyright if you make such an argument.

As soon as the straw man steps in, I have to step out. Good conversation, but I think we are not gonna see eye to eye here.

For those of us following along from home: Care to point out the strawman?

Technological innovation in a competitive free market has nothing to do with the original point. Meh, I'm over it. At the end of the day, I feel that copyright infringement is stealing, and other people don't. I am fine with a legal distinction, but I see no such distinction from a layman's moral standpoint.

> I feel that copyright infringement is stealing

But laws and policy aren't about feelings; they rely on consistent and precise definitions of terms.

If anything here is a strawman, it's your insistence on equivocating two behaviors which are substantively and observably different in their intentions, methods, and effects, in order to apply the moral censure earned by one disingenuously to the other.

If you want to make a meaningful argument against copyright infringement in its own right, please do so; I'd welcome the productive discourse. But arguing against it by calling it calling it by the name of another thing entirely - without bothering to establish a coherent connection between the two - doesn't constitute a valid argument in the slightest.

Further, my previous comment involved nothing resembling a strawman at all; you offered the position that copyright ought to be protected in order to ensure that the time and labor input into the initial design of a creative work would always yield a return for the creator, and I replied by pointing out that these are capital expenditures, to which no one in any field is entitled a guaranteed return at all.

Do you seriously regard as a strawman my classification of the advance investments necessary to open a factory and the advance investments necessary to produce a film both as capital expenditures, but simultaneously claim that your equivocation of copyright infringement with stealing is a robust and substantive assertion?

> I see no such distinction from a layman's moral standpoint

Then why do so many "laymen" actively assert this distinction?

Again, I have to point out that your methods of discourse actively reduce the credibility of your position.

To steal is to deprive, to copy is to disappoint.

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