Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

What sticks in my craw is Falkvinge's continually disingenuous use of the word "monopoly." Owning and asserting a copyright does not make you a monopolist any more than owning a beach house on the Oregon coast makes you one. All property rights are monopolies. That does not mean owners of property rights are monopolists. Concretely: nobody is preventing someone from producing the next summer blockbuster and distributing it for free on BitTorrent, just as nobody is preventing you from building a beach house on the Oregon coast and letting anyone stay over.

I think there is zero potential for significantly eroding copyright rights, and a bunch of young people who don't produce anything themselves certainly won't be the impetus for change. At the most basic level, copyright strikes a cord with people: if I make something, I should own it and be able to control it. Young people are willing to play fast and loose with those property rights, as they always have (cutting through people's yards, etc) but that doesn't signal the impending downfall of property rights as a system.

> Owning and asserting a copyright does not make you a monopolist [...] All property rights are monopolies.

Copyright is not a property right, it is exactly a state-granted monopoly privilege, instituted on ostensibly utilitarian grounds. See http://stpeter.im/writings/essays/publicdomain.html

Cory Doctorow has elsewhere explained how IP used to be discussed in terms of a "creative monopoly" until the 1970s when the copyright industry began actively promoting the "intellectual property" moniker. The reason? It's a lot easier to go hat in hand to Congress to ask them to protect your "property rights" than to petition them to further extend your monopoly privileges. In much the same way, they'd like to now redefine copying as "theft". "You wouldn't steal a car." Don't fall for it.

The modern understanding of copyright is indeed a property right, both legally and and economically. And only in the US is it rooted in the idea of building a public domain. In Europe the basis is the idea of the moral rights of content creators. The Europeans have been a the forefront of extending copyright terms, because within their framework of thinking, there is no reason for copyrights to ever expire.

If your owning a beach house in Oregon prevents me from building one just like it in Hawaii, it's a monopoly too.

You're quite welcome to make a movie "just like" Transformers 3. But that's not what Falkvinge is advocating for. He's not advocating for your right to "create" or "build". He's advocating "copying", "appropriating", "using" the work of others without compensating them.

Copying is creation. It's certainly a lot less work than the creation of the first copy was, but after a copy operation, there is indeed another movie just like the first.

What the building of the first copy of Transformers 3 accomplished, and building of the second copy does not, is delimiting of the type. This confusion in the context of copyright between an item and its type is the source of a lot of bendy arguments.

That navel-gazing definition of "creation" that is practically useless. It's indistinguishable from "use" in the digital context.

> young people who don't produce anything themselves

That's not a worthy characterization. Plenty of opensource contributors are on board with rolling back copyright restrictions to less extreme levels. There are also writers like Cory Doctorow, and a growing number of artists in a variety of fields, along with various economists and law professors.

The vast majority of people who peddle Falkvinge's particular view are teenagers who just want free stuff. There are lots of people who support less aggressive enforcement, shorter terms, etc, but not so many credible ones who attack the very idea that content creators should have rights to control their creations.

E.g. Lots of people strongly oppose SOPA, on the grounds that it makes enforcement of copyright other people's problem in a way that isn't the case for other property rights, without agreeing with Falkvinge that there is some moral right to copy.

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