Comment by kubrick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kubrick | Hacker News Reader

I would like to tell the Pirate Bay the same thing everybody has told us for the past 10 years. They should go out and find a new business model, one that doesn’t involve profiting from stolen property…What everybody who steals music should realize is that e-looting is not a victimless crime. Everyone who does it is hurting themselves. They are killing the music.

I wish the author of the article had addressed this quote more directly. "E-looting" is in no way "killing the music". It's not a crime, anymore than singing a familiar melody (that's under copyright) is an e-looting crime.

At least in the US, copyright law is unconstitutional. Read the copyright clause: there's no mention of treating the intangible as "property", nor is there granted the right to transfer "ownership". Far from it. Read Jefferson's letters on the subject, and you'd find he was very much on the side of the "pirates".

Just because you wrote a song doesn't mean I can't sing it. I can't imagine who died and told these guys that they deserved big cash for songs, but it's not true.

110 Supreme Court Justices seated since the Copyright Clause was enacted along with the Constitution in 1787, versus Kubrick from Hacker News. I wonder who's right about whether copyright law is constitutional.

This is a completely bald-faced appeal to authority, and it's not even a very good authority: it costs much less for Big Media to keep 110 decision-making people quiet over the years (through downward pressure from the other parts of government lobbied into agreement with them) than the amount they make while doing so; however, it costs much too much to convince the entire public of their side. In a democracy, if the public disagrees with a law, it's not really a law, no matter what the legislators say.

It's an appeal to authority in an argument about authority. The question kubrick set up wasn't "is copyright law right" or "sensible" or "practicable"; it's "is it constitutional". The answer: yes.

So the law is within the bounds of common sense when it defines the copyright period as the life of the author plus 99 years? The constitution says a copyright is granted for a limited time to encourage artists to create. How is Walt Disney going to be encouraged to create another Mickey Mouse when he's been dead for 40 years?

Appeal to authority is not always wrong. In terms of "Is it Constitutional?", the Constitution itself says the Supreme Court decides. Citing the Supreme Court on the question of whether something is constitutional isn't an "appeal to authority fallacy", it's just plain correct, whether or not it is also an "appeal to authority".

And as near as I can see, tptacek is correct in the citation. It may be vague but it is substantially correct; if it were unconstitutional to treat copyright as a property right, it would have been ruled so sometime in the last 200 years, instead of becoming the foundation of the system.

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